The focus turns on Dale in Pembrokeshire.

Not a ‘port’, as such, this harbour at in Pembrokeshire provides access to some excellent lure and shark fishing

Dale is a really quaint little village with some decent bed and breakfast accommodation and a great pub/restaurant, The Griffin Inn, which serves some of the best seafood you’ll ever eat in the UK.

There’s a small lifeboat station and a watersports café, where they teach kids how to sail, paddleboard and canoe. It really is one of Wales’ hidden gems.

GREAT SPORT

The fishing out of Dale is really superb and geared towards proper sport fishing, with a couple of boats offering completely different opportunities.

On the one hand you have a large charter boat, Broadside Charters, skippered by Andy Truelove, which offers all manner of fishing from general ground to wreck and, more interestingly, shark fishing the Celtic Deep, where the occasional tuna can often appear as a by-catch.

Then you have Awesome Fishing, which is Jimmy Lemon and his boat Bang Tidy. Jimmy specialises in inshore lure and fly-fishing for species such as bass, pollack, cod and wrasse. He also takes his clients a little further offshore when the weather is right for some superb spurdog fishing. You’ll be seeing just what’s on offer from Jimmy in forthcoming issues.

TACKLE TIPS

Depending on who you are fishing with, you‘ll need to take the right gear. Jimmy has a sponsored boat and he has all manner of lure tackle on board. Broadside also has the right gear for the shark fishing.

However, if you want to take your own, we would suggest the following: a decent 1020lb boat rod will cope with any downtide fishing at anchor for the spurdogs with Jimmy and the general fishing on board Broadside.

As far as lure fishing goes, a decent 8ft or 9ft, 10-40g lure rod will cope with almost everything you’re likely to encounter. It’s a good idea to take a mixture of lures too, from topwater hard baits to soft plastics and jig-heads. Fiiish Black Minnows and Crazy Sandeels are proven to work exceptionally well in the shallow waters here.