Duration: 9.00 pm to 12.30 am
Tide: HW at 10.30 pm
Weather: Calm, warm, very light NNW wind, clear
Bait: Rag, sandeel, fresh mackerel
Rigs: Two hook paternoster (size 1/0), feathers
Results: 1 conger, 4 dogfish, 18 mackerel
Report: I dug some ragworm in the afternoon and later I headed out to a rock mark that I fished a few times last month. I had intended to do some plugging for bass and concentrate on bait fishing after dark.
I got set up and baited one rod with rag and cast it out. I then cast out the plug but then noticed that the water close to the shore was "boiling" with mackerel. I switched to a set of feathers and cast out - first couple of casts just produced one mackerel each - I switched to a different set of feathers - this time pulled in three. That was shortly followed by four. The shoal moved along shore a bit so I followed them and got a another three and single and then four.
By that stage I had 18. That was enough - some for dinner over the next couple of days and plenty for bait. It was dusk at that stage so too dark to do any more plugging.
I got back to the bait rod, retrived it to find the bait stripped. I have not had a problem with crabs in that area so it may have been sucked off by fish while I was busy with the mackerel.
I rebaited and tipped with fresh mackerel. Shortly after casting out I had a bite - a small conger.
A little later I got the first dogfish - on rag tipped with mackerel.
It went quite for a while after that - so I switched to sandeel on one hook, mack strip on the other.
That improved things - I started to get bites - missed some but got three more dogfish all taken on the sandeel.
I am not going to reveal the location of the mark as the next time I go there the currently pristine mark with probably be littered with trash and swarming with mack bashers
