Fintragh - 26th Nov

Absolute peach of a moring and great to be out fishing. We were fishing the Donegal Bay club league and everyone was expecting it to fish after our last outing on it. The fish though didn't exactly play ball and I only managed one counting flounder in what was a fairly tame surf. Most anglers caught fish but the vast majority were undersize. First had two fish so the one flounder was enough to get me second.

Two golden labs were on the beach the whole day so I fed them all my mackerel bait leftovers. Can imagine that night they probably shat the lot over the living room carpet :lol:

Fished it again last night in a club outing, very poor with only a few flounder and small coalies showing. One of the lads did pick up a 42cm pollock though. Fintragh can fish its arse when conditions are right but you have to wade through a lot of dull sessions to get there. Bloody windy and big surf up which didn't help matters...even the labs didn't show up :lol:

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I remember fishing a small harbor(more like a slip) not too far from the bay pete a few years back I was using some sand eel colored lures I must have caught at least 25 big pollack and I remember not having to cast to far either...Lazy

Hi Pete,

What is the minimum measure size of flats at your comps?

Kev

Hello there kev, its 25 for flats, 30 for round fish

As Sean says, I think the 30cm for the round fish is too big. Lots of coalies of between 25 and 29cm on that beach but its bloody hard to get anything over the 30.

Lazycod I'd say u might have been at Portnacross, good pollock an wrasse west of it.

hi pete, we found in the upc opens that the 30cm size for roundfish was generaly too big for up here, thats why all fish sizes have been dropped to 20cm, which we now use in our club too..with minimum sixze 4 hook as an added conservation measure..

BigPhil, our club has done the same in relation to fish minimum sizes although we did try and get passed a min hook size also? It has been amazing the difference in our catches and we all try and use fine wire hooks for scratching as it makes it alot easier to get the hook out

The problem was, every hook manufacturer has size 4 hooks, but we found that not 2 of them were the same size. eg, aberdeen hooks fine wire size 4 against crab claw hooks again in size 4 . How do you police your minimum hook sizes within your club competitions?

I suppose it has a lot to do with trust?

Steve

it is 100% trust mate, as far as the pattern etc goes, if it says size 4 on the pack,(which may be handy to have with you)! then its fine. you will always get different gapes etc with different patterns, but at the end of the day, if you cant trust the guys in your own club, then you shouldnt be in it!(im not implying this towards u N&G)!!just a general statement

when involved with a previous clubgoing back maybe 10 years now, we basically ran this method of catch and release, 20cm etc before any other club in the north took it on, a way of checking hook sizes and keepin things fair, was to have it in the club rules that you are not allowed to have any hooks smaller than a size 4 on your person, or in tackle box, in traces etc, and if you are found to do so you will be disqualified, no questions asked.
at the time we had roughly 20 out at a club comp, so on some random days, the club chairman would decide to inspect the tackle boxes of everyone before they stepped foot on the beach etc checking rig wallets etc......hard line it may seem, but it definately ruled out any chance of anyone cheating! - then i checked his box!! :lol:
firm but fair approach.

as i said at the start, it really hinges on trust, at the end of the day, the best in the sport and common sense will always prevail.

Interesting, I have recently been really getting into the whole scratching end of things to some seriously good effect, the variations in sizes is massive TBH though, even within manufacturers. I have become a firm fan of Owner hooks but I can put a size 8 worm hook beside a size 4 fine wire pint hook and not see the difference in size. On saying that, I have size 4 crab hooks that look well bigger than size 1 aberdeens. I now choose my hook sizes by eye than actually going by sizes.

It seems to me though to be the only way to go for results on shallow sandy beaches in the daytime though, I have been amazed at the savage upturn in my catch rate by scaling things down.

Same here - smaller hooks are more effective.

Jude