Cold Weather Fishing Not So Hot

Not much is happening for me here in North Wales at the moment. The persistent easterly based winds, snow and intense cold have pretty much killed the fishing over the past couple of weeks for most of us.

I fished last Thursday night. Cold wasn’t the word…it must have been minus 5 or 6! I fished low water on a shallow surf beach and was wading through a few feet of ice slush where the incoming tide met the sand. Yep, the sea was trying to freeze! The sand was like concrete and the gullies at mid tide height with seawater in were surface frozen. I managed a whiting at maximum range fishing a two-hook clipped down rig and tiny bits of black lug tipped with mackerel.

I was a fool being out really. With the sand like concrete any live food in the sand would have burrowed way down deep away from the cold. Fish know this hence them being scarce in the shallows. I would normally have thought about my choice of venue better and gone for deeper water with a more consistent temperature, but road conditions were very bad and I chose to stay fairly close to home.

I spoke to a couple of other regular local rods and everyone seems to be blanking or nearly so, just occasional 5 bearded rockling, small whiting and the odd palm sized dabs being caught. Chatting to other anglers around the UK they tell me the fishing has also gone quiet on the Southeast coast, at Chesil beach, the Devon marks and in South Wales. I’m expecting the fishing to be tough until the wind swings southerly, which it’s supposed to do towards this coming weekend.

When a cold snap first sets in you can usually catch a few fish, but when it’s persistent and prolonged like this, and they reckon this could be the longest cold weather spell for close on 50 years, the fishing just stops dead, unless you can find real depth. Something to bear in mind if you intend getting out and wetting a line this week!

Fresh worm are also scarce due to the hard digging conditions with the worm having gone really deep, so you might have to rely on frozen worm tipping off with mackerel or squid to induce a bite or two. Sprat strip can also be good for pulling bigger dabs when fish are few and far between in really cold seas. If you can find a few, small white rag will be the killer bait fished on size 6 Kamasan B940hooks, but finding a supply is like coming up on the lottery.

I hope I’m wrong but it’s also been cold enough for long enough for inshore wrasse and conger living in the shallows to go comatose and start washing up dead on the shore. This was the case in 1963, a very cold winter that lasted from Christmas through to March, and also in the early 80’s when we had a couple of real cold winters and I found strap conger without a mark on them washed up on the shore line fresh as a daisy but stone dead.

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