Good angling friend Joe Moore and I arranged a quick session after rays at Friars Point.  The plan was to meet at Friars Point at 10.30am, well, you guessed it, we ran late and didn’t start our session until around 11.30am!

The fishing was very slow, we fished the tide down to no avail, with our spirits still high listening to some of Joe’s music we moved right to the end of the point and fished off the rocks.

Whilst we were waiting we had a brain wave of looking for peeler and hermit crabs, both of which we found with relative ease. Joe put three peeler crab on, coupled with two hermit crab and cast it out into the tide rip. Eight minutes later his rod was going and he struck into a fish, with only about 40 yards left to bring in the fish, it diverted him into rough ground and the fish was lost. Gutted wasn’t the word to describe the situation, but it gave us both hope we could finish the session without totally blanking.

To that ends, I put two peeler crab on and put it as far into the rip current as I could, listening to the Penn 525 Mag scream, with the line flying off the spool, I was feeling very hopeful.

Not long after the cast, I saw some nice little bites and then a good pull register on the rod tip, I picked up the rod and wound down and struck into a fish, the fish gave me a very good fight, every seven yards I gained on the fish, it yanked down and tried to stick to the bottom again, so now it was my turn. I used some bully tactics to raise the fish to the surface and after some perseverance; a nice sized spotted ray emerged. We weighted it straight after it was landed and unhooked and it weighed 5lb 2oz.

While I was playing this fish, Joe was in as well, later on landing another spotted ray, which was smaller but none the less, still a beautiful fish which was caught on sandeel. Unfortunately once the two fish were landed we noticed that we had run out of time and Joe had to go to work. We ended the session having not blanked with a few good fish and a little side rummage for some bait too!