Alter your tactics now!
Some trips change the way an angler fishes for a particular species. A busy plaice session off the Isle of Wight was one such trip...
Be it turbot and brill, plaice or flounders, there’s something about using light tackle for hard-fighting flatfish. A few years ago when my friend Andy Pilott messaged me on Facebook one evening to tell me that he’d just boated 37 prime plaice, I was quick to grovel and get myself out fishing with him. As it turned out, I only had to wait two days, and found myself on the ferry from Lymington to the Isle of Wight, armed with my camera bag, a coolbox and a couple of travel rods. I was certainly travelling light.
A mutual friend had also caught plenty of plaice by drift fishing, but Andy wasn’t too sure about it, and he preferred anchoring for them. We settled on a plan of drifting for the first hour, then sitting it out for the rest of the day at anchor. Looking back now, I wish we’d just gone with Andy’s favourite approach.
When we arrived at the marina we were greeted with perfect fishing conditions. There was only a slight breeze, which was forecast to die away as the day progressed. We loaded up Andy’s boat Viking, fuelled up, and headed west. Within half-an-hour of setting off, we arrived at the mark, where the tide had been flooding for about an hour or so.
We stuck to the plan and decided to drift over one of the small finger banks that were holding a few decent fish. Rather than red spots, it seemed as though we had been thrown a red herring. We didn’t have a nibble for the hour or more that we fished this mark, and we ended up losing about four sets of gear in snags. Andy decided to head off to an area where he knew there were fish.
ANCHOR IN, FISH ON!
Soon we were at an area about 30 feet deep in the Solent, where the tide was now two-and-ahalf hours into the flood. Andy dropped anchor and we got our static bait gear ready. I dropped my first rig down to the bottom.
Using 3oz of lead weight, my plan was to drop down and bounce it back in the tide until it was about 30 yards behind the boat.
As I lifted the lead weight off the seabed and dropped it back in the tide, I had a very positive rattle on my rod tip. I lifted up again and bounced the weight back for a second time, and this time my rod tip arched over and I was straight into the first fish of the day. What
CHANGING TACTICS
By the time I’d got the ferry back to Lymington and driven home, Andy had sat through the three or more hours of video that he had recorded during the day, and as soon as I popped up on Facebook that night he messaged me again.
“You’ve got to see this Dave, I’m just uploading a clip to Dropbox now”, he typed.
Well, I sat there in amazement watching the plaice and dabs swimming straight past our juicy baits and hitting the coloured beads. In fact, they weren’t just hitting the beads, they were taking them into their mouths and swimming the beads up along the trace.
It was a real eye opener for sure, and it instantly changed the way I prepare my plaice rigs when fishing at anchor. You can see the beads floating up in the water once the flatfish had dropped them, mid-trace. Obviously, these plastic beads float, and once they are positioned mid-trace they make the middle of the hooklength float up in a huge bow – not very good presentation at all. From that moment on, I’ve used a small rubber stop, or light wire stop, immediately above the beads to prevent them from moving along the trace.
I learned a great deal from this trip. Not just about the behaviour of the flatfish in this area, but about the baits and tactics required too. ■