Early season wreck trips

Has anyone got any info that they like to share for wreck trips out off Inishowen in April?
What do you's find works the best, Gilling a big unweighted shad, or redgill, or just use a normal trace of Jumbo Hookais or Big Muppets?

Hi,
not being cheeky, but best thing would be a grapple to remove the nets covering nearly every wreck around the coast!!!
Even tramore bay, to within a couple of hundred feet of the shore is being trawled to death at present!!
Thank god for pin whiting at least there is something left!
regards
screeming

This site is great, 102 views and the only advice is to not bother going!

paddy,

i'm convinced the continental style of shadding works better
than that developed by anglers fishing from the uk in the 1990s.

they use a 4oz lead head shaped hydrodynamically and cast it using
a fixed spool reel. lengths or 4 inches often coloured red/yellow
can work well. in my view using a ten oz lead and a plastic, or worse
metal, boom dampens the action of the shad and tangles often,
also tackle losses are higher

Of course if the fish are really feeding they will grab just about anything


the other thing i think works well if you anchor up is using a 12oz baited pirk for conger and ling. A squid and mackerel cocktail seems good

What's wrong with the good old gilling with a jellyworm? Just have a stock of different coloured ones with you, and keep changing worms and retreival speed till oyu find what's working on the day.

Plenty of fish fall to this.

I like a pirk with baited hookais or bright shads.the thing to do is try different rigs.best of luck

Thanks for the replies!
JW:
This continental style that you talk of, am I right in thinking that this is similar to the lead heading a jellyworm, ie just casting it on light spinning gear, sometimes refered to as ‘donegal style’?
If so do you reckon this will work at the depths these wrecks are at, would a 4 oz lead head not take too long to drop 150ft?
I like the idea for reefs at 30ft, just never considered it for wrecks.

On the pirk thing, when I was a younger, secondary school age, I didn’t like the idea of paying £2 a time for a lead, so I made my own, using a 1” dia pipe about 7” long, cut in half along its length, (now that I think about it my ma nearly cracked when she seen me carrying a beans tin full of molten lead thru her kitchen) Anyway the result was that I had loads of long thin really shiney leads, and all I every fished was a standard trace of Hookais or Muppets, and always done really well, for Pollack, Coalies and Gurnard and regularly out fished others using the same traces with the dull bought diamond shaped leads. I didnt really think about it at the time, but its quite possible that the big shiney lead was attracting the fish, and when they got close enough they then went for the smaller hookais?

not only can you use it at 150 feet, i was using it at 108 meters
a couple of weeks back. It does take a good bit longer to reach the
bottom than with 10 or 12 oz of lead, the technique it to flick
out coils of line and watch them disappearing as the lead head sinks.
I'm convinced due to the greater action you can impart to
the lure it will take fish when other methods wont work. Its
a lot faster and less tiring to wind 4oz on a fixed spool back up
from deep water as well

What rod were you using for this, John?

there are rods manufactured for this technique, ive a penn giller
thriller, or giller killer, something like that. it needs a bit of backbone
to bring up big pollack of coalies