I spent Saturday night camped out on an Anglesey rock mark targeting conger. It was a bitterly cold night, but one of the clearest I can ever remember with the sky full of stars and the Milky Way as defined as I’ve ever seen it. The night was so clear we could distinctly see the town lights as shimmering specs on the Irish coast far out on the horizon when walking along the high cliff path from the mark.

We’d timed the trip to fish the last two hours of the ebb and the first three hours of the flooding tide. Conger typically have pretty defined feeding times applicable to each specific mark. Some marks produce either side of low water slack, others give fish the two hours either side of high water, but most of these marks in North Wales are rarely good during the fast running flood tide or ebb tide when the conger seem to go to ground and hunker down.

The depth here is about 60-feet or so and the ground as rough as you can get, but for a change there were no lobster pot problems for us to contend with and the water out in front was fully open. There was little if any wind but it was coming in from the cold north quarter and you could really feel it clawing at your face. The sea carried a little swell but was pretty calm, though still carrying some colour after the recent storms.

I’d set up with a clipped down short pulley rig made from 120lb mono straight through ending with a size 6/0 Viking hook. I baited one rod with a section of bluey and the other with a mackerel and squid cocktail.

Bang on cue, about an hour before low water, I watched my semi tight line slacken and fall back towards the rock ledge as an eel ate the bluey bait. Winding in the slack and banging the hook home I felt that satisfying “brick wall” weight of a decent sized fish as it buckled the rod tip over and turned to try to make the sanctuary of the rock.

I had to really bully the eel as I felt it pulling through thick kelp, which is another hazard here. Once up in the water the eel hung in the water column almost refusing to budge, twisting and writhing as only snakes can, but steady pressure always tells and the eel edged closer and closer. I guessed where the eel would surface and aimed my headlight accordingly. It wasn’t a huge fish but it fought really well. Clive lifted it from the water on the trace. It was a fat, thick bodied prime condition eel that maybe weighed in the region of 15lbs. It went straight back after a quick photo!

Within 10 minutes my other rod was away and I landed another snake about 10lbs. As I was fighting this fish I watched the line on the other rod fall fully slack, but we couldn’t do anything about it as Clive was arguing with another eel that unfortunately spat the hook half way up in the water.  

Getting back to the rod with slack liner on I found that the conger had spat the bait and left the trace in a right old mess. I had one more bite almost immediately the new bait hit the seabed, but after feeling the fish again the hook pulled free. It was a big bait and I don’t think I gave the eel long enough to get the bait fully in, not wanting to deep hook it. But that was it, just as they always seem too, the eels had all come on the feed together, then as slack water came they all went back to ground and en masse lost interest. Over low water all we caught were dogs and poor cod.

About an hour up on the flood, Clive got a “tap tap” bite on the rod tip. We watched this progress until the rod tip pulled fully over. He set the hook and the fish thumped back. He instantly said, “Dun’t feel like an eel”, and when the fish broke surface I could see it was a good sized ling. I lifted the fish up and it had the length to make 5lbs, but when weighed it bumped the scales to 4lbs 5ozs, still a cracking shore caught fish! 

I said in last weeks blog I had high hopes as the high pressure weather system came across us for the weekend and it was great to be out fishing again. Okay the conger eels were nothing to get overly excited about size wise, but were big enough to give some real fun and the ling just put the cream on what was a cracking night to be out fishing.

My intention this week, with the bigger tides, is to hit a surf beach and try for flatties. This cold snap will pull the dabs in closer and there’s still plenty of time for a big flounder from the surf too.