Quick run through of a few short but productive sessions species hunting recently. First up was a crack at the River Exe, in the hopes of picking up a brown trout on a small Mepps spinner. I had a few follows but the trout just would not take. I did pick up a couple of salmon parr however, and a surprise perch, in absolutely belting condition.
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The salmon parr will count for now in the species hunt but hopefully further into the challenge I might have a go at catching a real one in the grilse stage. I also saw a number of grayling.
Having heard of vast mackerel shoals visiting the East Devon beaches, the next day I made my way to Seaton to try and get one for the species hunt. Armed only with a spinning rod, I made a quick stop in the local tackle shop for advice. I was assured that the mackerel were more or less beaching themselves chasing whitebait so my short rod would be up to the task and get a spinner out far enough to catch my first example of the species.
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With only three nuggets in my pocket, I parted with some of that for an Ondex Dexter spinner and made my way along the River Axe to the beach. At the mouth of the river were a couple of other anglers, fishing feathers. Talk about a confidence booster, there were mackerel smashing into fish all over the place. I was still walking to the water as I tied on my spinner and made a cast. I'd barely turned the handle before I had my first mackerel on.
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With the ease of that capture I put the fish back quickly, but in less than a minute the mackerel shoal had scarpered. I moved along the beach and spotted the shoal around 40 yards offshore. A long chuck (for the kit) put me back in the action, and after 16 mackerel, I'd had my fill.
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It was then on to the busier beach at Exmouth and back to my tompot blenny hotspot. This time I sat a bit further along the sea wall and found a new species of fish in the shallower water. In fact the water was so shallow, I flicked my scrap of bacon out and watched as fish darted out from under the surrounding rocks to grab a free meal. The above picture is about the nicest looking of ten or so shannies that I caught in this manner, but without a doubt they are the ugliest species of fish that I have seen in the flesh.
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Whilst the shannies lived in the shallowest of areas, the tompot blennies could be found only slightly further along the bank where the depth dropped down to six feet and more. But having caught tompot blennies before I decided to move again and scale right down to a size 20 hook and scrap of bacon to try and catch another species of goby to add to my rock goby from the last visit here.
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It worked, but a static bait was not all that successful. It was only when I cast along the inside of the wall and bounced the bait ever so slowly back towards me that I picked up two rock gobies and then two small sandy coloured gobies, which were, fittingly, later identified as pomatoschistus minutus, the sand goby.
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Finally, to cap off a bumper day for new species I had this sand smelt, which looked to me a bit like an oversized motherless minnow, but with two dorsal fins.
To bring this blog to a close, I'll round up a recent trip to Bude. Besides discovering how hard it is to coordinate my own limbs when rowing a boat I also found time to position myself among all the kids crabbing to try and find more saltwater mini species.
The bottom must've been paved with crabs, as despite all the fish heads and whatnot being tossed in on crab lines, they still sniffed out my bait (good old bacon once more). Thankfully I never actually hooked any and released them pretty easily. The only fish I caught were eels. Not so easy to unhook.
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It took a long evening walk to find my target species on this trip; the one which I was unable to catch on the Exe a few days prior. I thought the Bude Canal would be an interesting place to catch my brown trout for the species hunt but we walked so far along this watercourse, passing several locks, that in the end I believe we were actually fishing the very steady waters of the River Stratt. Regardless, catch a brown trout I did. In fact, in a quick burst I managed four.
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