11th May

No surf. Time for a bit of rough......

Sussex Chalk reef. Filled with life, and an SSSI

Met up with Paul at the ungodly hour of 06:00, to go and find some prawns. THe day had dawned with a much stronger than expected NE wind (gale?) that did rather mess everything up as it turned out. We began prawning, and still it is pretty hard work. Managed to secure enough for our session, when disaster struck. I got offbalance, wading through a pool, and managed to tip th entire bucket into the ratehr large pool I was wading. Nothing else for it, back to square one, and another hour of prawning again saw us with enough to begin our session. On arriving at the inshore mark on the West arm, it was apparent that we werent the only ones who had the idea to use this mark to get out of the wind. There was still wind though, and float control was very difficult. There were two rods there when we arrive, and another chap fishing the Black rock. Then anohter four anglers arrive on the beach and proceeded to begin fishing. It was all just a bit too much to expect a bass with all this going on. Just too busy. To say I had the hump was an understatement. No-0one had a bite, and after three hours we relocated West.

Cant name them but the cliffs are full of them

We drove West to a spot where I hope we would be out of the wind and maybe even catch a fish. Which I did, the Tompot Blenny that managed to engulf a big prawn. That was it though, and Paul unfortunately, failed to catch the bass which was his mission. I will take him out again in the near future, cos he's a nice chap and REALLY wants to catch ole Labrax.....!

Only fish in daylight today.

With no surf to speak of, I met up with Steve originally to go and play with Sharks up west. But as I am an idiot, I had misread the tide table and we had missed the pime time. To compensate, I suggested to Steve we pop down to a local rough ground mark. He was up for it, and we took a few crabs and headed to the spot. I have had my eye on this spot for quite a while, but never got around to chekcing it out. This seemed the perfect opportunity. A gulley, only fifty yards off the beach at high tide, but requiring very accurate casting to drop into it. This is where my 130gm "Stubbie" DVice really came into its own. With such a compact bundle, it really makes for easy casting with a high degree of accuracy.

7lb 13oz - Returned!!

Quite glad we did now, as second or third cast produced the fish pictured above. 7lb 13oz, extracted from very rough grounf using peeler crab. I mentioned this year is shaping up to be an angling corker. I rest my case your honours.......