Far Bank Night session on the beach
With the rivers low and stress levels running high, Dom Garnett needed little encouragement to take up sea angling pal Chris Lambert’s invitation to a night session at Chesil Beach. And the missus came too
WHAT a hot, testing summer it has been so far. As if the heat wasn’t enough, we’ve had civil war over Trump and Brexit, World Cup fever and, in my case, a diary with precious little wriggle room.
Perhaps it was pure good fortune, therefore, that my old friend Chris Lambert gave me a call just as I needed rescuing.
Would I fancy escaping for an evening of completely different fishing? Before that nagging to-do list could answer for me, I thought ‘stuff it!’ and began gathering supplies. Surprisingly, I even managed to persuade my wife to tag along.
There’s always something exciting about trying a new mark or a less familiar style of fishing. Although I grew up in Devon, doing sea as well as coarse angling, I hadn’t been beach casting in many a year.
Chris, however, had recently gone the other way, leaving the rivers and lakes behind for salt water. His warning that this would be ‘a very different ball game’ was the understatement of the year.
Compared to my previous session winkling out crucians for an Angling Trust article, this was like going from tiddlywinks to cage fighting. In place of my usual ultra-light lure rod for sea fish, I was entrusted with two immense beachcasters.
Now, I’m hardly a petite bloke but even I found the tackle mansized. There’s a good reason for this, of course. You never quite know what might turn up at Chesil, from tope to giant rays, and Chris has been catching some formidable fish recently. Was this really going to be an evening of relaxation, or would something give us an almighty shock in the middle of the night?
I needn’t have worried, at least for a while. It was a beautiful sunset as we shared some dinner and had a proper catch-up. Chris kept hitting the horizon with his baits – mine fell quite a lot shorter but at least we were covering plenty of ground.
We crossed our fingers, cracked open a cold one and made an agreement not to talk about politics. Meanwhile, Chris’s dog, Pepe, had already commandeered the blanket meant for my wife.
As for the fish, they kept us guessing. Chris had a strap conger and a small bull huss, before I hit into one of my own. Just a puppy at 3lb or so, but what a fabulous fish, somehow ugly and beautiful at the same time.
It was only once proper darkness set in and the stars were revealed that it finally arrived. No, not that rod-slamming bite, but the inner calm I had struggled to find in the whole of a hot, relentless week.