STEEL TOWN HOUNDS
Part of the venue’s not pretty, but the sport is hot. Does shore angling in this country get any better?
Exciting shark sport at Morfa beach.
Industrial landscapes may never be top of the list for the most scenic venues to enjoy a day’s fishing, but sometimes the standard of the catches trumps our quest to be at one with Nature. One such venue is Morfa Beach, also known as Margam Sands. This is a two-and-a-half mile long sandy beach, which extends from the mouth of the Kenfig River to the harbour at Port Talbot. It is owned by the massive steelworks, which provides an imposing, though somewhat ugly, backdrop at the north-western end.
If scenic beauty is your thing, don’t worry because you may be kept so busy catching fish that you will have your back to the heavy industry.
In recent years Morfa has gained steadily in popularity with shore anglers, yet until very recently it was one of very few locations along the entire South Wales coastline from the Severn Bridges in the east and St David’s Head in the west where I have neither fished nor visited. All that changed when I was invited to join top South Wales anglers Roy Tapper and Joe Arch on an afternoon’s trip targeting smoothhounds.
Fishing had, Roy enthused, been truly exceptional. Anglers were reporting unprecedented numbers of smoothhounds. Only the day before, one had caught more than 20 during a match at the venue. Roy
had caught a similar number for more than 200lb during an event the previous week. “Bring your rod, you’ll have a lot of fun,” he said: so I did, and I did!
TRAVEL LIGHT
The weather conditions were perfect for what would be an afternoon and early evening ‘on the hounds’ – hot, sunny and with little if any wind
I was well aware that the walk from one of the usual parking spots down to the beach is arduous, at least half an hour, especially when you factor in that for a lot of the time you’ll be hiking over soft sand.
Morfa is a venue to which you should travel as light as possible – and it certainly was a gruelling hike. When we trudged through the last of the seemingly neverending rolling dunes on to the flat sands, we found that, despite the beautiful conditions and reports of outstanding fishing, we had the entire beach to ourselves. The walk had been more than worth the effort.
Roy and Joe, who are both Welsh international shore anglers, had been convinced that we would start catching fish from the first casts, but it didn’t happen. Nor were our second or third casts productive.
Gradually, as the tide steadily ebbed away towards low water exposing acres of golden sand, that first fishless hour extended into a second hour.
HUNTING GROUND
Viewed at low water, Morfa is mostly a flat and featureless expanse of clean sand, seemingly an unlikely hunting ground for smoothhounds. The species is typically associated with foraging for crustaceans on or in the very near vicinity of reefs or mussel beds.
While, apparently, there are a few isolated mussel beds located off Morfa, if these are the big attraction then why don’t the fish just locate around those?
Why do they regularly hunt over clean sand, and in such shallow water? There must be some sort of food source attracting the large numbers of fish so regularly, presumably shrimps or something similar.
Certainly, the ground appears more suited to species such as rays, various species of flatfish, dogfish, golden grey mullet and, of course, bass, all of which can be caught here.
“You can catch fish here on all sizes of tides,” said Joe, “but if I was pushed, then I would say that mid-range tides rising towards springs tend to be the most productive.”
While waiting patiently, hoping for the action to start, I asked Joe what was his preferred rig for smoothhounds. “I’m using a pulley rig at the moment, which was in my box left over from yesterday’s match, though generally I prefer a fixed paternoster,” he said.
His fixed paternoster is tied using 50lb monofilament for the rig body, with a 3ft snood terminating in either a size 2/0 or 3/0 Tronix Big Dog hook.
“If you are targeting hounds, good-quality peeler crabs are unbeatable,” the ex-world champion explained, as he prepared a spare rig, a paternoster as described, with a juicy lump of crab.
SLOW START
By now the predicted hot period, low water, was nearly upon us and we had yet to register a bite between our four rods. Roy, who was further down the beach, was fishing two rods – one baited with crab, the other with squid to tempt a ray.
By now the promise of ‘incredible numbers of fish’ was starting to seem a tad ambitious, but then Roy shouted to attract my attention and I could see he was hooked up to a decent fish. I grabbed a camera and arrived alongside him just in time to record the action as he beached our first smoothhound.
With the fish unhooked and a few photographs taken before releasing it, I heard Joe shout out that he, too, had hooked a fish. As Roy released his fish, I trotted back along the beach to Joe, who was quick to confirm that he had hooked a hound, which turned out to be the twin of Roy’s, weighing somewhere from 8-10lb.
I was still taking pictures of Joe’s fish when a crash alerted me to the fact that my rod had just been pulled out of the rod-rest, and was on the beach and in imminent danger of being dragged into the sea. It had been the first cast that I had not left the reel in freespool with the ratchet on and, of course, this was the cast that produced my first fish, which, thankfully, I landed.
I had wanted to get either Joe or Roy to grab a few images of me with my fish, but this was not possible as Roy was hooked into his second fish, closely followed by Joe with another. From that point on things became silly, and for the next couple of hours at least one of us was hooked up to a fish at any one time. On several occasions all three of us were hooked up simultaneously. It really was chaos with me grabbing images as and when I could, in between catching and releasing hounds.
EPIC FISHING
Unlike the fishing at many of the more popular rough ground marks, here we were fishing over clean sand, and there was no chance of a fish snagging up once hooked. It meant we could relax and enjoy each fight. If a fish wanted to run, as almost all did, we could relax and let them run.
Initially, I had taken great care with bait presentation, but soon enough I was simply ripping off the top carapace from a crab and lashing it on a hook. I caught two fish on little more than a few crushed scraps and a bunch of elastic, when I had been forced to cast a used bait back out after unhooking a fish, then run along the beach to photograph either Roy or Joe.
Twice I was in such a rush to cast out, 80yds was plenty, and take even more action images, that I cast without resetting the wires on my Gemini lead weight.
These were the only two casts I made when I didn’t hook a fish. Coincidence? I think not. There is little if any doubt that the fish were all but hooking themselves against the resistance imposed by the grip wires.
The fishing was truly epic, certainly I’d never experienced anything like it. I don’t keep an accurate record of the number of fish I catch, but during this session I had silently decided it would be nice to release 10 smoothhounds, something I had never achieved when shore fishing. Further, I decided that if I did catch 10, at that point I’d call things a day. After all, how many pictures do I need?
Well, I did indeed manage to hit my target, with my biggest fish easily weighing more than 10lb. Roy weighed several of his, the largest of which registered 11lb 3oz, a decent fish by any measure, and we all beached several of this stamp.
During the two hours following our first fish, we calculated that between us we had released at least 40 hounds.
Does shore angling in this country get any better than that? ■