Phil and Roland’s Cod and Pouting Festival

It has been many months since I’ve been out as one of my fishing pals, David Bennett, who has been mentioned and pictured in these reports a few times, unfortunately lost his battle with Cancer last month. The Doggies of the Nab will miss him as will his fishing pals.

So Roland and I headed out on Sunday 27th Nov. as it looked the best day to go out matching our availability. The NE4/5 forecast meant we thought going up the Solent might be best to get cover from the wind. As it happened Sunday morning was reasonably calm so we headed off to East Nab. A slow start resulting in some good sized “smellies” (pout) to around 2lb, small whiting and the inevitable dogs. Just as we were discussing moving, always a good tactic, Roland had a strong knock, struck, had a fish for about 5 seconds, then…… Well we’ve all been there and as I’m writing this before the watershed I can’t repeat what he said. However 2 minutes later my rod went and a lovely 8 ½lb cod came over the side (see Pic). So, delay moving, amazing how one fish can change a strategy.

Roland kept his battle up with the odd large”smelly” and the “Selsea Flounder” as we now call the ubiquitous doggies to make it sound better, but nothing else, so we decided to move to north of the Nab. Here we got far more whiting, some 7/8 getting to the potential “keepers” size around 1½lb with the rest being the pencil sized. A 12lb Blonde Ray then came over the side and Roland kept up his battle with dogs and “smellies”. The cod came on single squid with most of the whiting coming on mackerel; pout and doggies taking everything although a whole whiting fished for most of the day caught nothing.

We left late afternoon as the light faded having spent some 5 hours and a reasonable day, although the wind had got up by the afternoon. Talking to other skippers coming back into the marina who had gone up the Solent, we did well compared to a lot so happy with the day.