A Cephalopod from the depths

The swell and wind has finally dropped enough for me to launch from one of my favourite fishing marks. The winter storms had destroyed most of the harbour wall protecting the slipway, with the boulders from the wall strewn across the once pristine sandy beach and slipway. This makes launching and landing tricky but possible in the calm and impossible with 2-3ft of swell. Kieren and Dwyer were keen for another trip after the successful mackereling trip the day before. A local came over to me whilst unloading the car and informed me that the beach and slipway would hopefully be restored soon, with diggers coming to move the rocky rubble, so that piece of news was promising. We negotiated the boulder field and made our way offshore to fish the deep water in the hope of catching whiting and haddock...... 

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We dropped our baits down in 165ft of water and before long small fish were attacking the strips of mackerel but none of us could connect with them – it soon became apparent that these fish were pretty small and could not engulf the whole bait. Kieren eventually pulled up a small pouting. I decided to check my bait and on doing so was meet with resistance on the line…. It wasn’t a fish, it felt like a piece of weed but every so often it would slightly pull back…. An orange ball emerged from the depths and then sprouted 8 tenctacles! An Octopus!! I’ve never caught one before so I was quite happy. It had a little walk around the kayak, changed colour a few times, climbed over my foot, then hauled itself over the gunwales and with a blast of ink shot back to the depths in the typical octopus propulsion swimming style…. Awesome! 

That was the most excitement for the day. Kieren and dwyer headed inshore to fish over the rough ground, I stayed out deep for a while longer, then located some large reefs, had a few bites but yet again failed to connect to anything, then joined them in close. Kieren had caught one small Pollack. We had a paddle along the coast and dropped baits at the edge of a large reef. I quickly had a small Pollack but that was the last fish of the day, we drifted out from 60ft to 160ft without a bite. A local charter boat also seemed to be struggling and hopped from one spot to the next with little to show for their efforts from what I could see. 

We paddled a mile or so back to the launch spot and neatly parked the Abaco in the V of 2 boulders with the surge of a swell. Another nice calm day on the water but this time the fish failed to show. The storms appear to have pushed the bottom fish away but hopefully it wont be long before they return.