THE ULTIMATE ANGLING BUCKET LIST

Restrictions on travelling distances over the water due to engine size back then were a real limiting
factor. We had a 9.9 hp Johnson on the transom, but faster boats such as the CJR with engines up to
thirty hp were just starting to appear, allowing people the freedom to explore more widely.
This was the late 1970's on into the early 1980's. A time when Fleetwood was a bustling charter port
famous for the quality of its thornback ray fishing, particularly on the smaller tides in and around
Morecambe Bay, which can be a hard place to fish when the tides gets up around nine metres and
beyond.
One mark in particular drew quite a bit of attention. Not only from the Fleetwood charter fleet and Fylde
Coast dinghies journeying across, but also from the Barrow boats coming out of the Walney Channel,
plus a few dinghies from Morecambe, that being the ground around a particular buoy known as
Lightening Knoll.
This was an excellent thornback holding area which would be fished at anchor with mackerel or squid
on flowing traces. Not exactly the tactic most likely to catch turbot. None the less, over the years, quite
a number of bonus turbot to over fifteen pounds were accidentally picked up, and always in that one
particular area.
With hind-sight, you can't help but wonder what might have been achieved had anyone bothered to drift
fish for them. It's also worth noting that if the you read the brill account below, the trawling line I refer
to in that which produced a turbot and some of the biggest brill I have ever seen, passed right alongside
Lightening Knoll. Amazingly a surprise 13½ pound turbot was also taken from the now collapsed
and sadly no longer with us Blackpool North Pier jetty.
I had my first decent sized turbot fishing the offshore banks out from Guernsey. Over the years I've
observed that some of the banks in that area appear to be better suited either to flatfish or to bass than
others. I'm not sure why that is, but the skippers concerned seemed to know what to expect and where,
obviously based on a lifetime of personal experience.
Some days bass would dominate, while on others, presumably either different banks or particular
regions of the same bank, big flatties would be the order of the day. Mixed in amongst these occasionally
would be an odd brill. But you couldn't really predict or set your stall out for them, which you could do
more so with the turbot.
The thing is that when you're fishing for
any one of big three main bank targets –
bass, turbot or brill, tactically speaking,
you're fishing for any and all of them.
A long flowing trace of twelve to twenty
feet armed with a 4/0 hook baited with a
live sandeel and weighted by a flat
circular watch lead to help prevent it
wandering laterally is the way to go about
it, though I recall one trip where the
skipper said that anyone specifically
wanting turbot should fish either a dead
sandeel or a long thin strip of mackerel
belly.
Watch leads
Maybe it's because turbot have more
chance of missing a live sandeel than the
faster moving bass, I don't know, though that's what they're on the banks to feed on in the first place.
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