SIX HOURS, £35… WHAT A BARGAIN!
A great value charter boat session.
What does £35 buy you these days? Half a tank of fuel for an average family car, that is assuming you fill up at a supermarket. A few hours down the pub followed by a bag of fish and chips on the way home, well that depends entirely on which part of the country you live in; in some places you might have to settle for a hot dog. What if I were tell you that there is a place where £35 buys you a place aboard a charter boat, and if you round things off at £40 the skipper will even supply the tackle and bait.
Tucked away in the south-west corner of Wales, Milford Haven has, in recent years, received much publicity for the excellent shark fishing found offshore, but charter boats have been operating here long before the current influx of boats started to arrive each summer to fish for sharks.
Occasionally, local boats used to run offshore and target sharks, but the focus for most anglers who used to fish from ‘The Haven’ had always been traditional mixed ground inshore fishing; bread and butter charter fishing over the many reefs, wrecks, sandbanks and other areas of productive ground that you’ll find at this most beautiful part of the world.
SHELTERED FISHING
By the end of October, most of the visiting shark boats have relocated to their home ports at the eastern end of the Bristol Channel, but one or two local vessels remain and fish through the winter. They catch plenty of fish, too, and a wide variety of different species, often from some of the most sheltered water imaginable.
Rather than being an estuary filled with brackish water, The Haven is a natural ‘ria,’ a drowned valley that was flooded at the end of the last Ice Age. Consequently, you can catch many species of saltwater fish within this vast waterway, often many miles from the open sea at St Anne’s Head.
Fen Duke is the skipper of Lady Gail II, a 10-metre Starfish that throughout the spring and summer is moored at Dale, near the mouth of The Haven, moving to the shelter of Milford Haven Marina during the winter.
In mid-January I joined Fen, a lifelong angler, and his wife Penny, along with a crew of four regulars, on a six-hour charter trip that, at this time of the year, is available for just £35, with an extra £5 covering bait and tackle.
Six hours might seem short when compared to the eight, 10 or even 12-hour trips that are more typical aboard charter boats around the country, but during the depths of winter, six hours is plenty long enough for most, especially when you consider many, if not most, of the marks Fen fishes at this time of the year are located just 30-minutes or less from the marina lock gates. This means that, typically, you get five hours fishing at anchor on these trips. How long do you get with a fishing rod in your hand on a 10 or 12-hour wrecking trip?
Just after 11am we slipped out of the marina and headed west towards the mouth of The Haven, passing the impressive oil and gas terminals. With the wind blowing a steady 20mph out of the north-west, it was forecast to increase to 30 or even 40mph by the end of the day. Given the addition of a hefty ground swell rolling in from the Atlantic, had we been booked to fish out of most ports in the UK, our trip would certainly have been cancelled.
Such is the unique topography of this area that when the anchor rattled over the side less than half-an-hour later, we were completely sheltered from the wind.
EARLY INTEREST
Fen had positioned us on a patch of mixed ground close to a wreck, one of several that are located throughout the lower half of The Haven. Trips in the past week had produced plenty of whiting, dogfish, huss, rays and congers, he explained, and these were the species we had set out to target. For bait we had a selection of frozen fish, including locally-caught launce and whiting, along with cuttlefish and squid.
Gareth Walters, one of the crew who fishes with Fen regularly throughout the winter, had some fresh ragworms, because he’d heard that quite a few codling had been showing in recent weeks. Baited strings of bait-catching lures covered the whiting, a simple running leger was ideal for everything else.
It didn’t take long for our baits to attract some interest. First dogfish and whiting were rattling our rod tips and, ultimately, were being hauled over the side. At first most of the whiting were undersized, but as the ebb tide spread the combined scent trail from our baits, more and much bigger fish were soon making an appearance. Freshly-caught whiting make great eating, and among the many dozens we caught
that day were plenty of plump pan-sized fish, and these were destined for a fish supper.
After an hour or so Penny hooked into what clearly was a more substantial fish. With Fen standing by with the landing net, the general consensus was that it was a huss, which indeed it was, a very nice one, too. Not long afterwards James Duke hooked another lively fish, which I was amazed to see was a smoothhound. Typically, these are long gone from the South Wales coast by January, and we don’t expect to see them inshore until April at the earliest.
Fen assured me that, during recent winters, hounds are far from unusual during his winter trips. The week before his crews had landed mackerel and a double-figure bass.
EEL REPUTATION
Milford Haven has a reputation for producing big conger eels, and recent trips aboard Lady Gail had produced plenty of these, including several approaching 40lb. Night fishing is particularly productive for eels, and evening trips aboard Lady Gail are very popular.
However, large fish baits dropped in the close
vicinity of a wreck during the daytime are likely to attract some attention. Sure enough, just as low water approached, Gareth Walters boated a very respectable inshore eel. Later, when the rest of the crew said goodbye and headed for home, Gareth would be remaining aboard because he had arranged to be joined by a couple of friends on another six-hour night session, specifically looking to catch big eels.
We caught fish from the start of the session right through until Fen eventually fired up the engine to return to the marina. I stepped ashore a little after 5pm, following a busy, fun-filled day that had produced a lot of fish with minimal effort, or financial outlay. With the exception of two or three species of rays that failed to show, we had caught everything we had expected – a bread and butter day’s charter fishing where everyone caught something and got some quality fresh fish to take home. That works for me! ■