Entranced

On paper everything looked spot on; high tide around 2310 just after dark, just how we like it.  The weather was kind too, cool with a light northerly but dry and bright, things should be comfortable on the beach.  But which beach?  Giles and I discussed it on the drive along ever narrowing lanes.  We fancied a change to our usual haunt and the timing of the tide brought shallower areas into play, in our inexperienced minds at least so we headed for Radar beach and arrived around 1845.

The cloud had drifted out to sea leaving a clear, hazy evening.  I could feel the north wind as we loaded up in the car park but our hike took us into a sheltered spot where we would spend a comfortable evening, despite the gentle breeze the waves were rolling and booming but we were comfortable.  As usual I had two baits in the water long before Giles who didn’t help his cause by leaving his bait in the car.  By the time he returned I hadn’t had a bite which was to be expected as he always catches the first few fish.  Sure enough he had bites straight away and managed to connect to two decent dogfish in fairly quick time.  I hadn’t had a bite just the rhythmical rod nodding with the flow, even the crabs were absent. The sun sank below the mound and the layers went on. 

Around 2100 I rigged up a hermit crab and tried to launch it with the heavy rod but the sky was light enough for me to see half my bait fly off.  I wound in to find I still had a decent lump of crab bound to the hook so bulked it up by whipping a slice of squid around it.  This unusual bait (for me at least) was successfully hurled a respectable distance, I tightened up to a nice curve then left it on the tripod while I sat down to whip up a proper bait to replace it.  As I did so I glanced at my rattle free rod tips every few seconds, a few minutes past then I done a double take after realising the heavy rod had straightened.  Whipping the bait was forgotten, I quickly wound down and pulled into a reasonable weight, it felt decent maybe my first Ray of the year?  As usual the resistance seemed to lessen as it got nearer the shore but when it reached the surf it woke up and started running down tide.  At this point I was wondering if I had a decent bass but the next wave revealed a Smoothound, not a big one by any measure but twice as big as any I caught last year and I was delighted. 

By now it was dusky and as usual the dropping light brought on another spell of activity.  It wasn’t hectic but we both had bites regularly, almost all of them coming to bigger baits fished further out.  On my light rod I tried big baits and small baits, varying the distance from a gentle flick to a full blooded cast.  Whatever I tried I only had one noticeable rattle on it all evening.  We missed a couple but each landed two more Dogfish and with high tide still to come we were confident of more.  The larger waves were now slapping our tripods so we hastily retreated our camp backwards a few yards.  In the dark there’s less to look out, the rod tips in the torch beams became the whole world but unfortunately they weren’t doing anything unusual.  Time passes quickly when you become entranced, two hours passed in a blink and without a knock.  It was time to leave.  The evening hadn’t gone as we’d expected but when do they ever?  Still we'd had a few fish each and I was well chuffed with the little Shark.