Fri Aug 01, 2008 9:16 am
Firstly - thanks to all of the advice & Pm's I received re: Kilmore.
Unfortunately after the site was restored I lost all of the info & couldn't remember the usernames of the people that had sent the info!
Had a great day out on the boat & was very impressed with the new Penn Powerstick & 320 gt reel.
Plenty of Mackeral around & once we got out a bit there were plenty of nice pollock & a few decent codling thrown in too.
Started off fishing sabikis got plenty of mackeral along with a few launce & small pollock.
Once we moved out further I switched over to baited hokkais.
I had Fresh Rag, Frozen Squid, Frozen Sandeels, Fresh Launce & Fresh Mackeral for bait.
I was the only person on the boat with non-mackeral bait & to be honest, I don't think I had any advantage over the guys using plain mackeral.
Black or red hokkais seemed to be doing the business for the bigger fish generally & I picked up some small ballens, pouting, coalfish & a red gurnard on little baited 'bleeding glowworms' too.
The cod seemed to be tight on the bottom & the few that I caught had brittle stars & little hardback crabs in them.
Launce seemed to be the killer bait for cod, I only had a few Launce with me but basically once I saw someone get a cod I dropped down with launce & got one too.
Picked up about 5 cod between 3 & 5lbs like this before I ran out of launce & couldn't catch any more.
There were plenty of pollock anywhere we drifted, nothing huge with the biggest being about 6lbs but I must have caught 20+ between one and 5lb.
Next time I'll bring 3 rods. One for the heavy work, one with a string of sabikis to target the launce & a carp rod to try spinning around the massive rocks.
Other species caught on the boat were dogfish, scad & cuckoo wrasse. Try as I might I couldn't tempt a cuckoo..
One guy on the boat got hooked into something huge which doubled his rod & straightened his hook.
The same chap hit into something similar about 10 mins later which snapped his line.
The skipper reckoned they were big cod. I was watching him fight them & the way his rod was going it looked like he had hooked into a 20lb mackeral. Makes you wonder whats down there.
Can't wait to get out again.
Thanks again,
Patrick.