Shooting Times & Country Magazine
Wreck ’n’ roll star for a day
Drift and anchor fishing the sunken ‘Pom’ pays off with a superb catch for Nick Fisher
Today, I’m standing on the deck of my boat: 25 feet of moulded fibreglass, 11 miles due south of Chesil Beach, 10 miles west of Portland Bill. Straight ahead, all is simply sea and sky. Nothing in between. Not a single other boat, just two hues of blue as far as my eye can see. This is why I’ve fallen in love with sea fishing: the calm, the peace, the solace. The aching aloneness of this place. A place of such tranquillity and wonder. A place that touches a part of my soul nowhere else can reach. At least, nowhere on land.
My eye catches a black shape breaking the oily, smooth blue of the surface. It seems to wave at me, like a slowly drowning man wearing a black oven glove.
on her maiden voyage on 13 August, carrying 40 first-class passengers, 60 second-class passengers and 1,000 third-class passengers across the ocean to the New World. She was once the pride of the fleet but now she lies on the flat, muddy seabed of Lyme Bay, a popular destination for both scuba divers and fishermen.
I’m always excited to fish the ‘Pom’ because she’s a big wreck, covering a large portion of seabed, with a lot of her structure still intact, which makes her a perfect home for migrating bass, mackerel, tope and pollack, as well as vast families of resident conger eels, pouting and even a few cod.
On that fateful morning in 1918, the ship that was once the grand Grecian Monarch was making its way from London to New Brunswick in Canada. It was the final year of World War I and the Germans were attempting to strangle Great Britain by destroying all merchant supplies carried by sea. She was hit in her crew-quarter by a torpedo, fired by submarine UC-77.
Fishing a wreck
There are two ways to fish a wreck like the Pom: to drift or to anchor. Today, I tried both. Drifting, I used rubber lures like ‘skerries’, which are spratsized fish imitators, and also large live ragworm, lightly hooked in pairs on a
line back down amongst the lethally sharp wreckage.
Soon afterwards, I hooked a massive fish but as I reeled it in the line suddenly went slack as though the pollack had got off. Then out of the deep appeared a 2lb pollack on the end of my line being pursued by a large, 40lb-plus tope.
The tope circled the boat, unfazed. As I dipped the pollack back in the water, the tope returned fast for another bite and then another. So intrigued was he by the struggling pollack, that he swirled and rose almost out of the water.
Truth is, with his speed, he could have nailed the pollack in a heartbeat, but either he wasn’t very hungry or else he was just happy to pose for the camera. Finally, he swam away, diving deep in search of something else to torment.
Bonus fish
Over the course of the day, I drifted during the flood tide and then anchored at slack water, in between the tides. And the Pom was good to me, offering up pollack, tope, big mackerel, thornback ray and even the season’s first black bream.
The thornback was something of a bonus fish. At anchor, I was trying for bream and I was being lazy by fishing my worm rig and not changing to a double-hook bream rig.
The tap, tap bite on my rod tip had all the hallmarks of a pesky dogfish or a pout — nothing exciting. So when I wound down on the bait and suddenly my line was kiting away from the boat and the reel was paying out to a hefty force, I realised this was no dogfish.