It’s clear now that inshore Kayak fishing is going to be a hugely popular sport. Instant communication through new media parades the latest craze across computer screens and iPhones, everyone knows immediately when the latest fishing sensation has arrived. So, leaving aside the reality that the Eskimo hunters have been at it for thousands of years, kayak fishing has been invented at exactly the right time. My son, Mark, seems to spend a great deal of time planning his kayaking expeditions. I feel he’d be better employed digging my vegetable patch but that possibility seems to have eluded him. Working away from his home in Dorset he doesn’t spend as much time kayak fishing as he’d like but given the opportunity he’s out at the crack of dawn to his favourite spots, inside and outside Poole Harbour. This is his story of one such day.
John Olliff-Cooper
It’s been an irritating year in one way. Having set myself up with a state-of-the-art kayak fishing outfit I expected to spend many evenings afloat. But my work has taken me up-country this year so with almost a full day out of each week lost to travelling and weekday evenings being stuck in a hotel I’ve spent an awful lot of hours thinking fishing rather than doing it. The days when I’ve been able to get out have been very precious indeed and they have been fantastic fun.
With a kayak you can fish for pretty-well anything. Some of the guys paddle way offshore in really rough conditions and fish for cod, pollack, and other deep water species but I haven’t braved that sort of fishing yet. For me the kayak gives me amazing opportunities to go for my favourite species – bass – and that’s what they are called, just ‘bass’. Everyone now seems intent on calling them sea-bass, the French call them bar, not bar de mer. It sticks in my throat to say it but for the first time since 1066 – the French are right.
Living on Poole Harbour, as I do, I’m lucky enough to have access to some of the best bass fishing in England. That’s not to say they give themselves up all that easily but the fish are there and that’s half the battle. I suppose I could have latched onto another kayak angler and been shown how to find the bass but I wanted to discover for myself how best to do it. To be quite honest I’ve had some fishless days but ultimately, for me, the secret has proved to be fishing where others can’t go and in really shallow water.
It was late August. I set off as dawn was creeping over Bournemouth to the east. The sea was glassy as I took the last thin trickle of tide ebbing to the west. Save for the distant plaintive cry of a Herring Gull it was quiet. Perfect.
I love my Kayak. I just love it. I’ve tried quite a few now but I reckon the Ocean Kayak Prowler 4.7 Ultra is the best kayak fishing platform known to man. It makes me realise why Vikings used to get buried in their boats: because they felt so completely connected to them. On this morning as I stroked along effortlessly with the bow rising and falling to the stoke of the paddle I knew that feeling.
In the future I’d like to talk about lures: what works for me; where, how, and why. But after a lean spell and feeling that I really needed to catch a few fish I elected to fish a soft plastic sandeel. Fishing plastic sandeels isn’t as much fun as seeing fish cart-wheeling across the sea as they charge into a splashy surface plug but they really do catch fish.
With the Ultra’s shallow draught I was able to skim over rocks that would rip the prop off an outboard. My first cast was towards a jumble of rocks in no more than eighteen inches of water and the lure was taken as I tightened down on the airborne braid. Bass in shallow water are really feisty. They can’t go deep so they go away – fast. Because an unanchored kayak is so light in the water it doesn’t take much of a pull to turn it. I played the bass and in a way the bass played me. We met at the side of the kayak and I scooped it in by putting a hand under its belly. You have to be careful doing this; bass have impressive spines and sharp gill covers. It was about 2½ lb. What a beautiful creature! But man disposes too, I’m afraid, and this one met its maker, with a frying pan and a hungry angler to assuage. Oh the primeval reality of it!
Of all the stupidities to which I could have been subject I’d forgotten my camera. It’s a shame because it all looked so idyllic, and it was. But I suppose the bass might have considered it to be less-so because the Red Gill lure proved to be the undoing of twenty of them. I took ten for the freezer and returned ten, including all the bigger ones. They were not huge fish. The best might have topped five pounds if I’d weighed it and a bigger fish shook itself off at the side of the kayak. That might have been seven pounds. This all happened within about three hours, on the rising tide.
I took the view that twenty bass in a day was enough for anyone with a sense of proportion and I certainly didn’t want any more for the freezer so I stopped fishing and drifted for a bit, taking in the wonder of it all. In the distance a few noisy powerboats rushed off expensively in some sort of hurry, towards France, and the all-to-familiar scream of jet-skis wafted down from Bournemouth. In my solitary corner I reckoned I’d had the best of it.
Thinking that I might entice something different with a surface lure, I changed to a popper. The bass were still there because a suicidal little schoolie threw itself at the lure within a few minutes and was slipped back to grow a bit bigger. Then the mackerel arrived and I had a few interesting minutes with those.
Mackerel are scrappy little chaps. They were small fish so they also went back. Anyway, for me, nothing beats the taste of a charcoal-grilled bass: they are twenty quid a pop in the posher Bournemouth restaurants.
I paddled around for a while investigating areas I might try in the future but with the flood tide beginning to slacken I took the stream advantage of its lift back to Sandbanks. Having been warned to meet me on the beach my girlfriend Leoni took some photographs, and we headed home to light the BBQ.
I live a frantic sort of existence. I’m travelling north to work, or I’m travelling back. In-between I stare at a computer screen trying to make decisions that matter. But when I’m afloat on my Prowler 4.7 Ultra I don’t think about the rat-race at all. In a hurry-scurry world kayak fishing offers something very special. I know all-too-well that twenty bass days are not to be expected and I’ve now spent enough time doing this to know that that doesn’t matter. In a sense this is fishing as my father describes it used to be. I can’t recommend it enough.
Mark O-C
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