We’ve managed to get out a few times since my last report a couple of weeks ago, which heralded the start of the Winter Cod Season for this year.
Yes we’ve had the inevitable run of early winter gales keeping the boat in port but when we have managed to get out to sea we’ve mostly been blessed with flat calm conditions and at times glorious sunshine too. Some days we’ve even been down to our tee shirts, it’s certainly changeable weather at this time of year!
We did venture out to the wrecks one day as normally there are Cod out deep all through October and into November, but it seems this year they have certainly come inshore early. The wrecks didn’t produce any Cod that day but Grey Viking regular Steve White managed a decent Pollack and Ling on his Cod rigs.
The Ling are certainly making a comeback in our part of the Channel!
That day we moved to a shallower rough ground mark over slack water and sure enough we found the Cod on the start of the next tide, catching 4 in a couple of hours to 12lb. The takeaway from this seems to confirm that the inshore season has started a few weeks early this year.
Subsequent trips have concentrated on similar inshore marks and all have produced. The Cod are not leaping aboard at the moment but neither have we blanked, catching between 2 and 6 Cod each trip. I feel this is a reasonable result this early in the season, as normally we’d not expect to see them inshore in any numbers until around mid November.
One trip saw small strap Congers being a bit of a nuisance, we had over 20 of them! The best one went 20lbs to Clive Marshall.
At the start of this post I mentioned glorious sunshine and looking at the pictures you might be thinking “Where’s the sunshine then?” so I’ll round off this post with some more pictures….. of Cod in glorious sunshine!
So overall it’s certainly worth booking a trip and getting out to sea just now and I look forward to seeing you soon!
