Home | Blogs and Opinion | Mike's Diary Archive 2003 | Looking at natural signs and plaice fishing tactics

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Looking at natural signs and plaice fishing tactics

Mike Thrussell 04 June, 2003 01:45:00

ALL THINGS NATURAL
Visiting one of my local tackle shops recently I got chatting to a couple of guys from Solihull who were getting a few days fishing in along my stretch of the Welsh coast. One of them asked me how I knew when to start fishing for bass.

It all started when I was a kid and earned scarce pocket money working on the farms. The old farmers were full of information about using natural signs to predict the seasons. Some of this rubbed off on me and I started to apply it to my fishing.

Bass aren't dumb. No point coming inshore if there's nothing to eat. You need to keep your eye on how and when the first real numbers of peeler crabs start to appear, and it takes about a fortnight for the bass to realise that there's food available. Is it luck that this burst of peeler activity always seems to occur when I see the first swallows heading north? No! It's nature in harmony.

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Natural signs can point to better fishing
Watch the lilac trees as well. As soon as the lilac starts to blossom, then expect the bass to be inshore on the rough ground beaches. The air temperature and daylight length that sets the lilac in to bloom also dictates the right conditions for food such as crabs, rock pool prawns and blennies to become active on the beaches.

The lilac can also predict when the sandeels start to run the estuaries. When the bloom begins to fade and die, then the sandeels will be moving inside the estuaries and beginning to work up the creeks. I've found the estuaries poor for sizeable bass until the last of the lilac blooms have left the tree. Same thing, no food until the temperature is right!

The end of the lilac bloom also tells you that the crabs will be mating and you'll see more and more in the way of male crabs carrying females at this time.

It works on pollack too. An old countryman I got to know and deeply respected showed me that I was wasting my time fishing for pollack on the west Wales rock ledges until the bracken was deep enough to hide my bike. I hear you laughing, but he was right! It was all down to temperature again and the balance between the land and the sea.

Because this is an interconnected cycle of nature, it matters little what part of the country you live. You just have to learn what nature shows you then apply it to your fishing. Let the sceptics laugh. Learn it and it puts fish in your bag!

TIPS AND TRICKS
When making phone wire stop knots, instead of trying to coil the wire around the line with your fingers, coil it around a short length of 18 gauge stainless wire to form a tube shape and then slide the coiled tube down the line and simply twist it tight to secure. You can make up a couple of dozen of these and have them ready to go saving time when rig making.

PLAICE TACTICS

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Plaice fishing tactics
Plaice can be caught from certain beaches in February and March, but these are skin and bone after spawning and it's best to wait until May before targeting them when they start to fatten up a little. The plumpest fish are taken from August to October. They are found nationwide but the Scottish lochs, the Cumbrian beaches, the Welsh and Cornish surf beaches, Dorset, Hampshire and Isle of Wight coast and the Channel Islands generally offer the best opportunities.

Ideal ground is coarse sand, shell gravel and mussel beds with some tide run over it. They like small sandy bays close to rocky cliffs in a good water depth. Conversely they also move in on to shallow surf beaches running along the edge of weed and mussel beds and hole up in gutters and around sand banks. They figure inside the deep channels of estuaries close to the estuary mouth, and also on patches of sand amongst mussel covered rocky ground. They prefer to seek out depressions or holes in the seabed and let food get washed in to them.

Plaice are mainly daylight feeders and few fish are caught at night. They feed on seed mussel and other broken shellfish, worms, crabs and sandeels. Feeding times in relation to tide vary with each mark, but just as the new flood tide begins to run strongly is a good time, and again as it begins to ease, with the same periods through the outgoing ebb tide less reliable.

The best baits are lugworm, king ragworm with some tail left to wriggle enticingly, mussel, peeler crab, and try combinations of these as plaice are keen on variety. In gin clear water white snake ragworm are a real killer over coarse sand.

A good tip with plaice is to use light 12lb hook lengths and use leads that will just drift along with the tide. Plaice will hit moving baits far more than static ones. If there is little tide run, retrieve a few inches of line very 30 seconds to disturb the sand, which will bring the plaice in to investigate. Adding yellow and red beads in sequence just 3 inches above the hook spaced with silver sequins can also help induce bites. Giving the hook 3 inches of free line adds movement to the bait.