A Fleetwood Cod

After checking out the weather we decided on joining some of the guys from Blackpool and Layton Angling Society (BLAS) on Blackpool North Wall to fish in a competition. On arriving (after driving through some sleet!) the choice was made to move the match to a more sheltered venue at Fleetwood, known as the Cadet Base, where the Sea Cadets have a building as the wind and hence the surf was too fierce.

The match was started at 8pm and scheduled to finish at 11.30pm. Wendy and I had been looking forward to the first Cod sea fishing session of the season and on my third cast I managed to snare a plump little codling of 1lb 12oz (42cm long), using a big lugworm as bait.

The weather stayed fine for most of the evening except for a very heavy hailstorm halfway through the session. I was the only one to catch a Codling but a few large Whiting came out as well as a small Rockling.

Two Whiting for Dave

The top rod of the evening was Dave who was managing to pull in Whiting 2 at a time towards to end of the match using big chunks of Mackeral as bait.

The top bait for us was Blow Lug as we were primarily after Cod but we experimented with using Mussels as well which seemed to catch Wendy a few fish. It’s difficult to know if this was due to the Mussels or not so we’ll keep trying until we figure it out. The top bait for the night and the match was fresh Mackerel.

To catch the first Codling of the season during the first Codling session was great and it’s currently being prepared and cooked for tea – fantastic!

Rossal - Looking North

After the rather unproductive sea fishing session at Crosby on Saturday night we decided to be a bit more pro-active in our search for winter fishing locations and journeyed up to the Rossall Beach area of our coastline, near Fleetwood, Lancashire.

This area fishes very well in the middle of winter when the tides are high and the wind blowing off the sea. In previous years we’ve had many Whiting and the odd Codling (Cod of less than 5lbs) from many areas along this stretch of the coastline, caught mainly on local Black Lugworm.

The beach is bisected with many groynes which help keep the sand in place but pose a few problems for anglers. When the tide is high these structures are almost invisible and you can easily get your lines tangled round them.

More importantly, the sand build up creates a bank which constantly shifts depending on the tides and weather and to be in with a chance of a good fish you need to know where the gaps are in these sand banks and where any deeper gullies can be found.

Number 144

Thankfully there are a lot of sea fishing matches in this area and the local clubs have ‘pegs’ or areas marked in bright yellow so that the match anglers know where to fish from as these areas are drawn randomly for each angler before the start of the match.

This can help the pleasure angler as well as once you find a good area all you need do is find the nearest number to help you remember where you caught that prize Cod.

We took a lot of photos of likely looking places, as well as the nearest numbers so that we could identify where the images were taken and build up a map of areas to try.

We walked up to Rossall Point where there is a patch of rough ground covered in small mussels and tube-worms. On closer inspection it was clear that there were many types of wading birds present feeding in this area as it was uncovered by the receding tide.

Fishy Features

This was a sure sign of food items being present and on a medium to high tides we think this area will fish very well using black lugworm with mussel whipped onto the hook although in the rough winter weather the area looks a bit exposed.

We will be doing a lot of fishing around Rossall over the colder months so with this bit of information we should be in with a better chance of catching a Cod to go with our chips.