Lamprey for Sea Fishing

There are some pretty hideous creatures swimming our oceans and rivers, but one of the ugliest also has an appalling way of making a living. Lampreys are the water equivalent of Count Dracula. They lock themselves on to a luckless passing fish with their sucker mouth, full of small teeth, and suck their blood.

Lamprey work the estuaries and inshore waters around the UK tending to be found mainly on haddock, cod, pollack, coalfish and larger flatfish. I've also caught and seen caught thornback and small-eyed rays with lampreys attached to them. In deeper waters, ling, tope and even conger are occasionally taken with healing wounds obviously caused by lamprey, or still with the culprit attached.

So why our interest in lampreys? All that sucking of blood makes the lamprey extremely effective bait for quite a few sea fish.

Frozen Lamprey

Back in 1995, I got hold of some frozen lampreys from the then Atrakta Bait company (Predator Baits have since acquired the Atrakta label) who, by chance, had realised the possibilities of lamprey as a pike bait, plus I was hearing rumours that pike specialists had already taken some big pike on lamprey but were keeping the bait huss hush. Maybe other anglers had tried it too, but then supplies of lamprey had previously been pretty much unavailable as far as I could make out so lamprey as a bait seemed to have had limited use so far.

Before actually fishing with lamprey as bait, I started to do some research on the subject. Turns out that lamprey have a very oily and rich flesh, though not quite as oily as mackerel and herring. It was also a favoured food, even classed as a delicacy through medieval times and as late as the early 20th century in some European countries. No accounting for taste, is there?!

My initial thoughts were that maybe feeding fish would avoid the smell of lampreys for obvious reasons. But then I got to thinking, with all that blood sucking there was bound to be lots of scent going to be washed in to the water. Only actual fishing would tell.

ROCK HOPPING
I spent a summer fishing the rock marks in west and north Wales using conventional baits like mackerel, sandeel, squid, cuttle and combinations of these on one rod, and a second rod fished solely with the lamprey baits.

Comparing the two rods over this period showed a definite pattern emerging. I noticed that the lamprey was getting a quicker response than conventional baits when measuring the time between the bait hitting the water and getting a response from a fish. The fish were finding the lamprey quicker than normal baits.

The obvious questions this brought to mind were, were the fish finding the lamprey because the scent was stronger and more fluid and therefore travelling further quicker, or did they simply prefer it to other food on offer? I figured the former. They were tracking down the lamprey quickly because the juices and blood from it were more fluid in the water giving a better scent trail to follow.

I put cut lamprey in clear shallow water with a gentle passing tidal current and you can see that the juices are slightly less oily than mackerel and float less as a consequence keeping the scent trail tighter to the seabed. Mackerel juices tend to be more buoyant and the scent trail at seabed level less strong.

This was further backed up by autumnal fishing sessions when the sea was often coloured and rough after storms. Conventional baits continued to catch as normal, but the lamprey did noticeably better and often produced a much quicker response.

What about species? No real difference to mackerel and other standard baits. Lamprey produced conger, bull huss, small ling, dogfish and three bearded rockling. Mackerel baits might pick up other species like pollack, shore rockling, pout and poor cod a little more frequently than the lamprey, but then I'm generally not looking for these at the same time as when I'm after eels and huss.

BOAT FISHING
At the same time, I was running experiments from my dinghy. Just from the shore results I knew that huss and conger would take lamprey, so I deliberately targeted tope and thornbacks.

Thanks to heavy tangle netting in my area, catches of thornbacks were poor at the start of the season, so I worked offshore for the tope first. This was a revelation!

The pack tope off mid Wales are in good numbers running between 18lbs and 40lbs, with some bigger fish to 60lbs plus. Daily catches of 30 plus fish are not uncommon.
Ideal circumstances for comparing baits when you're getting lots of bites.

I prefer to fish small whiting flappers or dab section for tope as I find these produce more fish than mackerel and went with these two baits on a couple of rods, but fished a third with the lamprey.

During peak feeding times when numbers of tope were around the boat all three rods would be playing fish immaterial of bait types put out. Pack tope can't afford to be selective. Then it got interesting. When the packs move off you still get odd fish lurking around. At a rate of more than 2 to 1, it was the lamprey that these lurking tope picked up. It was the scent factor again.

Later in the season with the commercial boys now mainly working the lobsters and crabs or prawning, a few thornbacks started to be taken aboard the charter boats. Time to try out lamprey on the thornies, but by now I'd got a pretty good idea of what was going to happen.

The thornback marks are not usually good for other fish in my area. It's thornies or nothing, bar dogs and dabs. On the first trip, we ran a spread of four uptiders, two out from each side and the other two off the stern fished downtide. One off the port side I baited with lamprey.

The lamprey bait accounted for two rays within 30 minutes and another fell to a mackerel bait off the stern. We put lamprey on the other uptider on the opposite starboard side of the boat and got another thornback. We put a lamprey bait on one of the stern rods and interestingly both stern rods caught almost straight away, one on the lamprey, one on a squid and mackerel cocktail. The next replaced lamprey bait caught almost again almost immediately. I won't bore you with any more evidence, suffice to say that the lamprey always seems to have its nose in front on the fish caught score board.

HOW TO FISH LAMPREY
The average lamprey is about 35cms long. For huss and rays both boat and shore, plus smaller sized conger and ling off the rocks, I cut the head off between the gills, and the tail off just above the tail fin. Now halve the remaining body to make two baits.

Treat these like a large launce sandeel for baiting up. The body is supple and can be put on the hook point and bent around the hook gape up on to shank. For casting you add a little elastic thread, but it's a tough bait. Tope off the boat will also take this size of bait, but use the Mustad barbless Tope & Ray hook for minimal damage to the fish when unhooking.

I also like lamprey for targeting bigger than average shore conger, but I take the head and tail off as before, but then use the whole body. This can be presented on a single large hook like an 8/0, or a pennel rig made up from strong 6/0's. I prefer the pennel rig due to the lamprey's relatively thin body in comparison to the size of 8/0 hooks normally used.

For big eels, I use a pulley rig with a hook trace about 50cms long and from supple 120lb mono.

I prefer a pennel hook rig made as follows. Slide a 6/0 Mustad O/Shaughnessy up the trace, add a small 5mm bead, and now tie on the second 6/0 O/Shaughnessy at the base. You can slide the lower hook inside one end of the bait and then bend it and slide it down around and up the hook shank at the same time until the lower hook point exits the base of the bait. Now semi lock the upper hook in place by twisting the line around the shank then nick the upper hook point in to the top of the bait. The bead protects the knot above the lower hook should the bait disintegrate during the bite or fight. I've had eels to near 40lbs on this rig and it hasn't let me down yet.

It maybe an ugly critter, but lamprey is slowly making a big hit with a few sea anglers and looks likely to become one of our top baits in the next two or three years.

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