Return to Budleigh

Another weekend of clear and clam weather tempted me back to the beach at Budleigh Salterton for another night fishing session. Again the weather was still and flat calm making any little movement of the rod tips obvious. This week the high tide was bigger and at a more sensible time than the previous week. It was decidedly cold again but this time I really felt cold too.

I set up two beach casters, each with a pulley rig to fish mackerel on one and squid on the other. I’d arrived at the beach to find that I had no bait elastic and no smaller hooks which wasn’t a good start. I ended up using big baits and pennell rigs so that the upper hook of the penned could help hold the baits on.

Just like last week the bites were prolific with loads of rattles and pulls within moment of casting out. Unfortunately it seemed that the bites were from small fish as connecting with anything was difficult – I suspected small pout or whiting. Eventually a decent bite resulted in a dogfish to save me from blanking and then a foul hooked tiny pouting validated my suspicions as to what it was that was rattling the rods. 

We didn’t persevere given the cold and beat a hasty retreat to a well known fast food establishment on the way home. Time to invest in some more cold weather gear and go through the tackle box to make sure I’ve got everything I need in future.

Budleigh Salterton – No shortage of fish

The first week of the new year and I decided to action one of my new year’s resolutions, which was to get off my lazy ass and get out fishing more often. We’ve had a lot of wet and windy weather recently – so with a weekend of calm and dry weather it would have been amiss of me to not wet a line or two.

The tides were neap tides and quite late, with the high tide being 1:45 in the morning. Not my preferred time but beggars can’t be choosers so I persuaded the wife she needed to accompany me and we headed to Budleigh beach due to it’s convenience above all else.

I had a frozen mackerel and a quarter pound of fresh ragworm for bait so decided to set my stall out targeting whatever came along, using small hooks / baits expecting a few dogfish.

I arrived to set up and found a couple of other anglers with the same idea so walked along the beach a short distance to get some space to myself. I set up two beach casters – one with a single hook pulley rig baited with mackerel and the other with a 2 hook rig baited with ragworm on a small hook and a larger hook set immediately above. The reason for this being that if a small pout or whiting took the baited small hook I could leave it out there and the large hook would be there should a bigger predator take what was now a livebait.

The weather was perfect – no wind or waves. Every little movement of the rod tip was visible – and there was no shortage of action. As soon as either rod was cast out and put in the rod rest, within 30 seconds bites were registering. I pulled up numerous tiny pouting, a small eel, a bigger eel, a dogfish and finally a nice whiting.

After a while I did leave the two hook rig out and ignored the little rattly bites and just fished with the one rod. At the end of the session the two hooked rod was brought in to reveal two tiny, perfect bait sized pout which proved the concept of catching and fishing the livebaits had worked perfectly. Shame the bigger fish weren’t around the play ball.