I hired the "Deora De" a 35' Offshore 105 charter boat skippered by Jim Linehan for our 4th annual work outing. While the boat itself is a newcomer to Cork Harbour for 2006, Jim has been involved in the Cork boat angling scene for many years and I remembered him from when he crewed on previous work outings we had with Cork Harbour Boats.
The boat picked up the 10 of us from the pier at Monkstown at 10am as arranged. Conditions didn't look too bad for fishing with a bit of cloud and the wind predicted at F3 to F2. We had a slight change of routine from previous trips, in that we didn't stop in the harbour for Mackerel as other charter boats had reported on the radio that they were scarce. Instead we
proceeded to an area known as "The Spits" (hope I've got that right) about 5 miles or so outside the harbour where we found two other charter boats already on station.
The conditions were a bit worse that predicted with a sea fog and visibility down to about 300 yards. It was also a bit choppy with wind gusting to F4 at times, resulting in one of the lads having a bad bout of "mal de mer" :cry:. However that didn't deter the rest of us :). We were soon getting stuck into the macks and then it was straight onto the bigger stuff. Things got off to a good start when I took a 5lb Codling on small baited hookais. This was followed by other lads latching onto a good number of small 2-3lb pollack and a couple of similar sized codling. We spent the next hour or so on the drift when we hit a bit of a purple patch which saw a nine pound pollack caught, swiftly followed by 3 Ling around 5lb mark. Encouraged by this, I switched to bigger hookais (Grauvell Killers). The gamble paid off when I took a nice 9lb cod which was a PB for me!. That and the 9lb Pollack turned out to the best fish of the day.
However we weren't finished. As the sun broke though and the wind slackened off at 2 O'Clock we continued to catch a good number of smaller fish as before including a Haddock of around 3lb. I don't know how common they are around Cork, but I hadn't seen any in the 3 previous work outings.
Eventually the fishing dried up on that mark, so we headed back to just outside the mouth of the harbour for the last hour. Three or four more smallish ling were caught as well as lots of whiting in the 1-2lb range. We called it a day at five and headed back to port.
All in all a very enjoyable day out. My thanks to Jim for his advice and assistance especially to the newcomers who gave him the thumbs up.
Paul