So far the weather in August has been fairly decent around Holyhead and My Way has been able to put to sea every day for the first half of the month. The early part of the month was spent on fairly large tides that restricted our choice of marks but the variety locally meant that we were never stuck for sport.
Many of the days would start off on the drift inshore looking for wrasse, pollack and codling. It’s a great way to work around our coast, travelling and fishing for some extremely hard fighting species on balanced tackled. During August and September, the majority of evening trips are spent on the drift, only anchoring up for the last hour to for a well-deserved break and enjoy our supper.
On one such evening trip we were treated to a fantastic sunset and some excellent fishing with plenty of ballan to 3lb and some extremely colourful cuckoo wrasse along with a few small pollack. Following a hectic couple of hours drifting we anchored to test the bottom fishing and give us some time to enjoy our sausage butties. As usual when the kettle goes on the sport was hectic with a variety of species coming over the gunwales including the second ever tadpole fish to be caught aboard My Way. The icing on the cake when boat regular, Dave from Manchester, brought a beautiful inshore ling to the net. The cracking fish weighed just under the 15lb mark, the biggest to be caught aboard My Way and our only double figure ling to date, a fantastic fish for inshore shallow waters.
Thanks to Gethyn Owen for the image
The inshore fishing has again been generally very good on most days with only the occasional blip. Some of our junior anglers have really been making the most of the time they have afloat and catching a variety of fish from hounds and rays to the ever present dogfish and a variety of gurnards. It’s always a pleasure to take the youngsters fishing, they are always keen to learn new tricks and fairly often beat the adults at their own sport.
Towards the middle of August the tides started to reduce in size and with the first viable tide size upon us and very favourable weather we were off to Holyhead Deep for a bash at the double figure species out there. Our run to the mark was glorious, bright sunshine and one of the flattest seas I have ever seen at the Deep. Looking east, the eerily flat horizon met the early morning fog through which the mountains of the Llyn peninsular poked through, an awesome sight.
The spurdogs reported earlier in the year had all but gone, but for the next few days the lads were all rewarded with numerous double figure bull huss and many small pack tope. I lost count of the number of tope in the 10lb mark, small but also great fun from 200ft of water. There were bigger tope landed and a few lost each day, not the best thing to happen after playing the shark for 30 tiring minutes. The largest of the tope during this set of tides took the scales around to 32lb and was a personal best for Rob from St Helens Sea Angling club.
