THE ULTIMATE ANGLING BUCKET LIST

The plaice fishing there back then from May through to around September was exceptional. The slipway
actually marked the approximate boundary between the rough and the sand, with a maze of drying banks
and gullies stretching north right the way across to Haverigg and into the Duddon Estuary.
Our ritual was to arrive at low water and start digging blowlug, stopping only when we had at least
three hundred worms, which was back breaking work. The boat would then go in, launched by car from
the beach on a making tide, which was always a dodgy thing to do. We never came unstuck, but we
certainly had our moments.
The person driving the car wouldn't actually stop at the waters edge. The trailer would be unhitched
while the car was still inching along so that the wheels didn't sink, and would immediately go back to
the top of the slip for safety, leaving the trailer to be hand-balled back using a tow ball launching trolley
to make it into four wheel unit.
On the water, my boat partner Steve Lill would head up along the coast leaving me to layer the lug on
three or four sheets of newspaper, maybe twenty at a go. These were stacked on top of each other in a
bucket, with any damaged worms separated off for immediate use. A great way of treating blowlug. It
cools, shelters, and hardens them up, all at the same time.
We later tried using frozen blacklug left over from our winter cod campaign which also worked quite
well. Not so much in terms of numbers of fish, but for some reason with the better fish.
On odd occasions we even tried twice frozen blacklug. Now that really did sort some of the better fish
out. Probably because it was a bigger bait in the first place eliminating unwanted attention from small
dabs and smaller plaice, giving the better fish more of a chance.
This is probably as good a point as any to make a very clear distinction between two contrasting
approaches to catching plaice, depending on where it is in the country you live. The choices are drift
fishing and anchoring, and the determining factor is how the plaice in any given location distribute
themselves.
Where they are spread out widely over a large geographical area, then drift fishing is fine. But when
they are clumped up in discrete pockets, anchoring is a much better approach. There are however other
considerations, such as rate of drift and water clarity.
Up here in the north west, we find them both clumped up and in areas with a mix of boulders, mussel
banks, and sand, which makes drift fishing with bottom trailing baits potentially problematic both in
terms of sticking with the fish, and loosing tackle. So for us, anchor fishing it is.
Back then it was with a wire three boomed paternoster with droppers measured just to touch bottom,
armed with 1/0 hooks, because plaice have quite small mouths. That's how it was in the 1970's, though
I don't know why I'm apologising for the pats in light of the numbers of fish they caught.
Bearing in mind that we dug bait for the first couple of hours, had to launch and motor out, and by the
top of the tide we would be scratching about for any bait scraps we could find, on one particular session
we finished up with 530 flatties, the majority of which were plaice with dozens going between two and
three pounds, which while that might not sound big, actually seeing them in the flesh, they are a fabulous
fish by any standards.
Over time, we tried all sorts of other rigs. Long two hook traces with the lead attached directly to the
bottom of the boom were the flavour of the day for a while, as were one up and two down scratching
rigs, all of which caught plenty of fish. So long as the baits were on the bottom and the rig wasn't causing
problems through self tangling, it both didn't and still doesn't matter that much.
Other considerations and observations carry far more weight, and one in particular which needed to be
taken on-board was patience, because without it you could spend an entire trip looking for numbers of
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