@Saintly Fish was kind enough to offer me a trip out on Tarlach Too today. The plan was to hit low water slack at a shallow mark near Lymington for stingrays and gilthead bream, so we set off at early o'clock to grab the tail end of the ebb.
As we headed west we were greeted by a large flock of gulls working the water dead ahead of us. It would have been rude not to stop and see if we could bust the blank early doors.
So with some feathers hastily tied on we were both soon into mackerel, and even a bonus school bass for me. With 10 or so mackerel in the bucket we headed further west and soon dropped the anchor on our mark.
Didn't take long for the bites to start. Small black bream were nibbling our worm baits but the baits lasted long enough for Neil to hook into a decent stingray. During the fight it even managed to flap clear of the water - who knew stingrays could fly??
Not content to rest on his laurels, soon after he hauls up a lovely gilthead bream which went to 2lb on the scales. I'll leave it to him to post some pics of his catches.
As the tide flooded the weed became unmanageable, so we pushed out into the navigation channel where smoothounds were the target. Skipper did good and put us on the fish.
Again, I'll leave Neil to post up some pics of his hounds, but suffice to say he caught more of them, and they were bigger! 🤣
I also managed a nice little black bream from this mark, on a 1/0 hook intended for dogfish.
As the time ticked on we decided to move closer to home and stop off at another shallow mark to see if we could find any more giltheads. I managed to find a productive method by casting sideways and letting my ragworm and ball weight trundle around in the tide. A fair-sized schoolie bass and several bream fell to this technique.
Neil managed another couple of good smoothounds here to round off the day. Six species from three marks in six hours of fishing. Quality sunshine, quality giggles and quality skippering. Got to hand it to him, @Saintly Fish did good today - thanks mate, it was a brilliant session!