Galway Bay 23/7/08

People: Self only

Duration: 6 hours

Tide: 3hours euther side of LW

Weather: Overcast

Bait: Feathers, baited feathers, mackeral strips on simple ledger.

Rigs: Basic

Results: Pollack, mackeral, pout, doggies, huss, spurdog and tope

Report: Many, many fish caught also a spider crab. Fished a new mark identified by http://www.infomar.ie/ . Very satisfying experiment. 4 tope in all, fishing alone I am unable to boat them. So I have a system for unhooking them from the side. Biggest problem was avoiding the pollack. Felt tired at the end of the session! Later fished one of my usual marks - not so productive.

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very nice finding a new spot well done on the tope!!!

Nice 1st pic! What's your guess at the weight?

Yes, so pleased at this new mark. Well worth studying the seabed profiles via the link above. Google Earth required - a free download.

As for weights, well I'm not good at estimating weights for larger fish. Lets say that I caught a small tope, 2 medium ones and a big one! At a guess - 15 lbs, 25 lbs and 40 lbs. Purely a guesstimate. Image is one of the mediums. Didn't think about taking a picture when tackling the larger one ( the first one ) , I was so preoccupied and excited.

The day following my expedition on this mark, I saw a 40' commercial working this area with what looked like net gear. Had he had been doing his homework too?

Great stuff Peter, and great link. Must be fun managing the Tope on your own!

Good session with the Tope!
Good find with the info as well, is a position taken off Google Earth fairly accurate?

SeanP wrote ' is a position taken off Google Earth fairly accurate? '

The simple answer is yes and, indeed, to within a very few meters.

When I originally downloaded the seabed data from infomar it automatically became part of my Google Earth ( don't know how ). So each and every time I load Google Earth the sea bed data is there! Just along the West coast - where it should be. Even better, when I move the cursor over the interesting sea bed features the GPS co-ordinates are displayed to a detail of 100th of a minute. Many displayed features tie in with my existing GPS co-ordinates logged as marks. This, of course, raised my interest in the vaidity of this data.
On reflection, the infomar data has potential commercial value. I am therefore delighted that it is available at no cost.

Thanks for the info Peter, very interesting indeed, it paints a whole new picture compared to the admiralty charts :shock: now if only we could get it loaded onto a chartplotter 8) :P

Section off Smerwick harbour
[img:1040:875]http://www.seanpalmer.hostinguk.com/other/googleinfomar.jpg[/img]