First trip out of Brighton for some years. Boat was yellowfin, very nice catamaran with pleasant skipper and deckhand. Target was bream with possibly conger, tope and maybe plaice. 8 anglers on the boat, £75 each. About 50 minute steam to a Mark about 6 miles off Worthing in about 50ft of water. Anchor down with an ebbing tide and bites straight away on a 2 hook paternoster with bits of squid and a 3oz lead. Bream were nearly all under a pound and mostly female but mackerel were obliging so dropped a live bait down on a tope rig. Had one about 15lb/18lb within 5 minutes. Target achieved so back on the bream. More tope came up along with strap Congers to the anglers fishing big baits but the better bream were absent. As the tide fell away bites tailed off and the boat began to swing off the mark. Managed a decent smooth hound on a chunk of mackerel but with no sign of the flood tide it was mostly tiny pout or mackerel. Skipper was keen on catch and release so the 2 thornbacks that were caught and nearly all the bream went back (females). Back in the marina by 4.15 . Interesting day with plenty of bites and free parking but very little in the fish box.
Sounds like a busy trip. Those small bream shoals tend to dominate the ground at times, should be some better ones around in autumn. Definitely a nice day to be out.
When the smaller bream are intrusive, try a squid head on a size 1 or even a 1/0 to pick out the bigger fish. It can work on occasion with whole squid on a 3/0 aimed at hounds but the big bream do seem to prefer the heads. Once the pin bream arrive though, they'll strip any squid bait in seconds like piranha.
Was Yellowfin by any chance a yellow Cheetah? There was a charter boat of that name built same year as my boat, though I thought she'd gone down into Cornwall.
Steve
Yellowfin is a large white catamaran, could easily accomodate 10 anglers without feeling crowded. I agree that a squid head does catch the odd large bream but it is also a dogfish magnet. When bream are the target species I never go above a size 4 and usually fish sixes or eights as bream have very small mouths and larger hooks lead to lots of missed bites unless you wait until they have managed to swallow the bait which leads to deep hooking. There were plenty of anglers on the boat fishing larger hooks and baits but there were only 4 bream landed that might have made a pound and a half, the vast majority were under a pound and the smallest ones were under 6 inches long. I think the bigger bream had left the area possibly due to presence of tope.
Agreed, a 6 trotting a squid strip downtide on a flowing trace is the killer for bream. Have also landed big undulates and reasonable conger that way, though not by choice! Off Selsey though, I’d guess 75% of all the 3lb+ Bream I’ve had have come to squid heads or whole squid, usually aimed at something else. We were blessed with few dogfish there though.
Looks like there are at least three cats called Yellowfin then. I feel a name change coming on 😆
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