Last Thursday I made the trip down to Swanage for a few days LRF. With fond memories of one of my first LRF sessions all those years ago on Swanage pier, I had high hopes for the next few days as under the pier is a haven for mini species and some not so mini wrasse and pollack. Thursday evening saw me fishing off one of the concrete jetties next to the lifeboat station. The water clarity was awesome compared to the currently tea like water of my local marks. At first I fished an ecoger katsu aji straight on a jighead under the jetty hopping for a few mini species, but the amount of weed on the bottom prevented me from presenting the lure successfully. A switch to the caro produced numerous pollack once I had worked out the presentation that they wanted. Caro is a new technique to me but one I will definitely be using more in the future. Caro setup Caro pollack I was fishing a small white caro kabura fly and a tict N caro which the pollack were going mad for, casting out under the pilings for the lifeboat slipway, letting the caro sink down, giving it a few twitches and taking in the slack and letting it sink again. twitch, twitch, twitch, pause..... bang! Great fun. Friday.... Peveril point on Friday afternoon The weather was awful, overnight winds had seriously reduced the water clarity, I fished the pier for a few hours managing a few small wrasse, but with the wind and rain worsening I gave up on fishing and went for a walk instead. Checking the weather Friday evening was a bit worrying as the forecast was for a biblical amount of rain on Saturday, not the best weather for filming or introducing a friend to the world of LRF. but I needn't have worried... I met Paul at the pier at 0900 and we headed out the the lower deck to see if we could nail a few fish. As this was Paul's first LRF session I explained a bit about the rods, reels, lines, lures, rigging options etc. I set Paul up with a splitshot rig and marukyu power isome, which in my opinion is by far the best setup to get those new to LRF catching and minimise the cost of any tackle lost as its much cheaper to buy a packet of shot and hooks than jigheads. I've found the owner mosquito hooks to be perfect for splitshot setups. I was using my tried and trusted ecogear aqua and size 10 0.9g shirasu jughead combination. Straight away Paul was into a ballan wrasse of around 1.5lb. The look on his face when the wrasse powered off under the pier was priceless, Paul was over the moon and rightly so! Paul's first rock pig. Well the pressure was off me as Paul had caught and bites were coming constantly, I had been a bit worried about how the water clarity would be after the strong winds we had on friday but today was a different day and the visibility had improved drastically. A corkwing wrasse for myself cheer up...... Chunky female Tompot Pauls first scorpionfish The fishing was fantastic and we ended the day on around 20-30 fish between us and 5 species: ballan wrasse, corking wrasse, pollack, scorpionfish and tompot blenny. I had planned to video my session and produce a video in a similar style to my Weymouth video (link bellow), but my gopro was playing up... it would only record for 4 seconds before stopping. Apparently this is something to do with the memory card, lesson learnt don't buy cheap ones! Weymouth LRF: http://youtu.be/caOkWeOThcE Paul produced this awesome little video of the days fishing: http://youtu.be/q4fsSdXuLJ0 If you have any questions about LRF or you would like to give it a go, feel free to contact me on Facebook or twitter.
