Just a single sailing today with David and his grandson James on board. With the fishing now officially harder, the standard rig becomes one for scratching up anything. A great rig for this, is an HTO frolic, with a string of size 6 HTO white feathers above. This will deal with everything from cod to herring. It also means, should you hit into a shoal of bass, that you accumulate numbers quite quickly.

The usual routine today. But what was unusual, was the first mark we hit. It has been mostly sterile the last few sailings. Today, there was a mega fish pile rammed on there. We dropped down, and in my head I knew the rods would be slamming over. My guess was herring would be responsible. Instead we were double / triple shotting small bass...

As the tide increased in strength, so the bass and the bait they were feeding off drifted away. A trip to the pouting spot produced... pouting... Love it when a plan comes together. For the final hour, we tried another spot which I find throws up bass most of the year. Guess what? It threw more bass up... The final tally was 30 + bass (including the luckiest bass of 2018... on the final day of legal KILL, David insisted on returning it. Good Karma...) perhaps 20 jumbo pouting, but zero herrings. A single gurnard... And more importantly, plenty of fast and furious lure action on the last day of the year...