SHORE SPECIES SPOTLIGHT
Often an all-year target, fishing for this now prolific species is best during March to June
The focus falls on thornback rays.
WHEN & WHERE
These rays are almost a full-year target for shore anglers, though they can be locally seasonal too in areas like North and Mid Wales, also the Yorkshire coast and East Anglia.
They show in most areas right through from February to November, with the period from March to June a high point, coinciding with the main crab peel, then again from mid September through to early November, coinciding with the autumnal influx of whiting.
On deeper rock venues, steep beaches and maybe estuary channels, thornies are likely to be caught during smaller neap tides as well as spring tides.
For optimum results on shallower surf beaches, choose the bigger spring tides. These rays favour the tides occurring on the three days before the highest tides. Once the tides fall lower, so too, generally, will catches.
Rays often move with the tide, but do so in gradual steps. Low water and the first hour of the flood see you cover fish beginning to move in with the fresh tide. They seem to pause briefly on this ground, then move closer inshore again during the two middle hours of the flood.
Thornbacks can be found quite close in just inside the breakers as the tide floods, but generally a cast beyond the breakers into deeper water is better.
They rarely come closer than the mid-tide mark, and as the tide peaks and ebbs, they soon move back out to deeper water, often beyond casting range.
Try to fish in fairly settled, predictable weather. Sea conditions should be slight to no more than a moderate swell. They don’t mind coloured water after a storm, but prefer less-coloured settling seas.
Off the rock ledges and the deeper water beaches, thornbacks can be taken in daylight, but on shallower venues, target a low-water flooding tide that begins in full darkness.
On shallow beaches, the rays like to be on the seaward side of shallow, rising sandbanks. Look for distinct areas where there are depressions that hold water over low tide because rays work through these as the tide floods. They also like the corners of beaches where sand meets rock.