Back to my roots

A change of plan this year and the canvas we normally sleep under was left at home as we spent a week at my parents on Anglesey. (They live in the village with the very long name) Instead of the usual camping trip to shell island and the angling for Bass in the estuary, the fishing was back to grass roots stuff at some of my old haunts on the Menai Straits. This is where I started my fishing at six years old catching gobby's from rock pools with a six foot rod that was bought for me from Woolworth's. Yes, I can remember when Woolworth's used to sell all sorts of fishing tackle and I invested loads of my pocket money on a few of the rods and reels they had in their range, my first beach multiplier was from there and I remember learning to cast with it in my early teens and once mastered I made the change from fixed spool to multiplier casting for most of my beach fishing as well as the clubs casting competitions. As a junior, I used to be a member of the Llanfairpwll and district sea angling club and we had competitions every other weekend through the spring /summer months with a few one off matches in the winter,  we even had casting competitions run in conjunction with the Sea Angler magazines casting club, these were great fun and I did achieve the 175 metre casting club badge, a long way for a heavy lump of soft metal. Sadly, all this was given up when I left the area to go to university, that is when the fishing changed but that's another story.

The first session was on the quay at Pwllfanogl and is where I used to fish several times a week after school, we used to fish mostly for Codling and Flatties with the odd trip for Congers, this session was more to do with seeing if anything had changed. Lug and Crab had been collected from the beach and the fishing was around low tide, one hour down, three up which used to bring the best results along this section of the straits, things hadn't changed and I started getting rattly bites straight away the culprits being some very small Codling no bigger than the top of my box.

They were feeding along the edge of a bank at around one hundred metres out, on the edge of the main flow, and were taking the bait as soon as it hit the bottom. After a hectic hour on the Cod I dropped the casts short onto the rougher ground infront of the quay with the intention of a Doggie or two, they used to be fairly predictable and very useful during the club competitions. After a couple of casts to find the spots I had the first of many on the bank.

Had it been November, the Codling would have been much bigger as this is when the main run of Cod used to pass through the straits with double figure fish being fairly common, catching a few small Codling together with a few Dogfish (Or should I call them Catsharks!!) had me smiling all the way back to the village.