The start of December saw myself, corbyeire and Ian meet up for an enjoyable few days fishing beaches and piers in Donegal. The fishing was particularly slow on the beaches, though what they made up for in a lack of fish they made up for in stunning scenery, but things improved markedly on one of the piers in particular where we caught some very decent dabs, managed doubles of strap congers, corbyeire got a decent conger, and got thornback ray, coley and pollack amongst other things. The chat and craic was good too of course and a few beers were had to round it off in the bars of Killybegs. Two incidents of note were when we saw a large wrasse coming to the surface to mouth a mack head at the edge of a pier only inches from our feet and when a woodcock, of all birds, flew across the shoreline at dusk and got caught-up in corbyeire's line. The woodcock is an oddball bird in my book, a nocturnal woodland bird with a bill that you'd more likely associate with a shoreline marine wading bird, but a beautiful bird nonetheless and the first one I'd ever seen. It was nice to see one up close. It was released unharmed.
Next up was a solo trip to a small beach on the north Antrim coast. I was hoping for a bass but fishing was slow and the only fish caught was a hard fighting coley of about 1.5lb. The fish had taken the hook deep so I dispatched it and had it for supper that evening. The interesting thing was its stomach contents, its belly was stuffed with a whole array of small colourful snails.
Finally, yesterday saw johnpaddywest obligingly make the trip up from Co.Armagh to fish a local beach of mine on the east Antrim coast, in Red Bay. The hope was for a bass but we were told (typically, lol) by others that we "should have been here last week!", when the bass were "jumping up the line".. The numbers and sizes of fish varied depending on the angler we were speaking to lol but the case seemed true enough all right; the main contributing factor to this bass bonanza seemingly being the large surf that was on the beach at that time. The fishing was slow for myself and Paddy yesterday but at least we saved the blank with a few tiddlers of whiting, coley and cod, and one semi-decent coley. An enjoyable session on a beautiful beach under flat calm conditions - a campfire was lit, a few coffees were had (I'll try and remember the buns next time Paddy
) and it was great to get a catch-up. I'll certainly be keeping an eye on the conditions of that beach from here on.. p.s. Don't mention or ask who caught that coley yesterday... but johnwest is certainly posing with it
