THE ULTIMATE ANGLING BUCKET LIST

In retrospect, wonderful days. Particularly the Guernsey based trips aboard 'Arum' out fishing the same
mid channel wrecks as some of the Plymouth and Brixham boats. We'd often see Geordie tied up there
in the marina. Long trips from the south coast, but well worth the time, cost, and trouble back then.
An era when to stand any chance of catching conger by anchoring over the slack water, you first had to
give a wreck several hard fishing visits simply to thin out ling in the twenty to thirty pound bracket to
be in with even a sniff of the biggest eels.
To some people those ling were quite literally a pest. I bet they wish they could get similarly pestered
again now.
Occasionally you might pick one up on a redgill, especially in the early stages of slowly retrieving the
lure just after it had touched bottom. We would also pick them up on pirks, particularly baited pirks,
aimed at cod.
But if you really wanted them, a
simple short single dropper rig
made up of eighty to a hundred
pound bs monofilament to beat
the teeth, and a 10/0 hook to take
a good sized mackerel bait, would
out-fish any other approach
hands down.
Open ground Ling fishing, Hartlepool
So prolific were the ling back
then that if one came adrift on the
way up, you could quickly send
the gear back down again hoping
there might be some bait still left
on the hook, and if there was,
imediately hook up a
replacement for it.
In fact, there were days on which if the wind was light and the tide was slack enough, and if you was
quick about it, when you could squeeze in another drop after the first fish, and hook up again before
drifting off the wreck.
Hard work, but there if you wanted it. Then, progressively but noticeably, by the mid to late 1980's, the
shoals of big ling were all but gone.
Angling over the wrecks certainly played some part here, particularly as ling can't get back down again
even if you did want to put them back.
But commercial fishing, and an ever decreasing number of virgin or little known wrecks made a far
bigger contribution. So much so, that my last run out to the mid Channel wrecks from Jersey saw us
come back with maybe two or at best three moderately sized ling, and we were happy even to get those.
Following on from all of this was the realisation that wreck fishing out from Whitby, and subsequently
quite a number of other ports in that general area of the North Sea, could be just as productive as the
mid Channel wrecks previously had been. Only this time, monster cod and plenty of them were the
target, with some exceptional bonus ling thrown in for good measure on baited pirks or muppets.
Ling weren't the primary target. None the less, anglers had them to over fifty pounds. Then, as with
English Channel, over exploitation by everyone involved, anglers and commercials alike, saw that
prospect also go into fairly spectacular melt down.
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