Thankfully this year has been as good as last year in regards to sunny days and warm weather.
While on the shore or near the beach it's great, though it is causing havoc for us inshore anglers that are vulnerable to strong sea breezes can be quite fierce.
Though I'm getting the odd session in sheltered areas, mostly chasing pollock and tope.
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| Fantastic scenery. |
I even tried to use a micro plug which I find excellent at times, I was just paying out the line as I paddled and as I put the bail arm on the microsurface plug was stuck some 30+ feet down. A sneaky pollock shot up in clear water on a sunny day and grabbed it off the surface.
The pollock was from a previous session, that fish was about 5lb.
The last day the majority were not great average of 3lber a few 4lbers and a good few 2lbers. Even bigger lures didn't improve the pollock size.
So on this day, I fancied a crack at the tope. Though the tides were strong enough and it was quite breezy it was worth a shot.
At this stage of the year, most tope have headed out of the loughs and can be found less than a mile offshore. As weather conditions could be better I just went half a mile off.
On my tope rod I had a pulley rig which consists of 1ft of 100lb wire to 150lb swivel which is tied to 150lb mono body that has a 150lb swivel between two beads that stay in place by stop knots on the main mono body of the trace.
The other rod had a two up and one down rig.
I use a pulley rig for tope around donegal as I get plagued by dogfish. Though on this day it didn't matter no matter how many baits I put down or what they were it was devoured by dogfish.
I even tried holding the pulley rig off the bottom to no avail.
As a last resort, I tried head and shoulders of decent mackerel despite that when most lads come to fish here I always say to avoid the heads as it can result in a lot of dropped runs.
I still caught dogfish, but a lot less, and eventually while I was really in my other rod, the tope rod went from sitting there to almost shooting off the front of the kayak.
Ah, it was fantastic. Scared the crap out of me but it was great to have the line peeling off the reel and an impressive rate. For a moment I thought it was a small porbeagle as there seemed to be no stopping it. Though eventually it did and it gave a great fight, a handy tope of 30lb came in with the usual thrashing and splashing, a quick picture and away it went back to the depths.
As always it was great to be out and I was looking forward to tomorrow would bring.
Until the next time, paddle safe.
