I spent the day yesterday with Paul on Sea Otter 2. Sailing with us were a group of regulars including the Shaskespeare rep who had a bag of goodies to try tempt the cod with.
Whilst myself and Paul stuck with the tried and tested storm shads, Nigel tried a few of the shakespeare range and a new shad from Berkley called the "Hollow Tail Shad".
Im not sure of the market price of the hollow tails but one thing I can say is they will be well worth a look. The lad had the biggest and possibly the most fish of the day, all on a browny/yellow coloured hollow tail.
The day started slow, and the vibes coming from the skipper were not good. Paul feared that the weekends northerlies had coloured up the water and knacked up the fishing. We fished the last of the flood tide on a couple of wrecks and only 2 cod came to the boat in a 90 minute period. Myself and a few others switched to bait, whilst Paul persevered with the shad, saying that bait would not work on these wrecks as the fish were feeding on sprats. The skipper was right and I never had a single fish on the bait. I continued to study Paul who hit into a couple of fish just as the tide turned in the opposite direction.
"They are going to come on big style" said Paul "Get the shads on, the switch has been pressed". How right he was. The next drift saw every rod on the boat go into action. The change of tide had meant all the spratts had balled up on one side of the wreck and the cod were having a feeding frenzy. The next 3 hours was just solid cod, there wasnt a drift over the wreck without at least 2 rods in action, and often most rods on the boat were bent over by the pull of cod.
Paul then told us that we had to move off the wreck to give it a rest. "But dont worry" he said, if theres fish on that wreck then its garunteed there is fish on every wreck in this area. So we steamed back inshore a little way. As promised, first drop on the new wreck, saw every rod bend into action, and this continued untill it was time to steam home.
Back at Whitby I helped out by filleting the fish for the lads. Out of the 6 anglers on the boat they said they had had 150 cod, some kept and some of the smaller ones returned. Best fish as mentioned earlier fell to Nigel the shakespeare rep, a plump cod of around 15 pounds which took the Berkley hollow tail shads. Most fish of the day was a toss up between myself and Nigel.
I was fishing the blue storm shads and Nigel was on hollow tails, there was much between us with roughly 35 cod each. I only kept the better of my fish with the biggest going roughly 9lb.
This was probably my best days boat fishing in the past 20 years (In terms of numbers of fish). All in all not a bad day out
Topic: Cod, Cod, Cod & More Cod - Shads Doing The Business (Read 5199 times)
