Boat Angling

The web site for eastern Solent boat fishing

Author: Neville Merritt (Page 2 of 41)

Owner of www.boat-angling.co.uk and
www.arfordbooks.co.uk
Author of "Angling Boats"
Director of Pure Potential Development Ltd www.pure-potential.co.uk

Reminder: Dr. Christina Hunt needs fishy photos!

21/10/2024 / / 0 Comments

At the September SMAC Monthly Meeting we had a guest talk from Dr Christina Hunt from the University of Portsmouth. She outlined two current projects: seabed mapping and a fish-length AI development project. She nows has a volunteer for the seabed mapping but still needs lots of fish photos with rulers, so her AI program can “learn” how to measure fish from a photo. I admit I keep forgetting, but if you catch a fish please can you take a photo of it next to a fish-length ruler and send to Christina at christina.hunt@port.ac.uk ?

Thank you!

P.S. You can still add your boat to the Seakeepers Discovery Yacht Programme if you would like to be involved in future research projects

September 2024 Catch Report

10/10/2024 / / 0 Comments

September was a very wet month although that shouldn’t matter on the sea which is already wet. However, wet weather is usually accompanied by windy weather which does matter because that’s what stops us going out fishing. You can tell when a lot of boat anglers are frustrated by the weather by the number of political memes circulating on our chat forums instead of fish pictures.

That sounds gloomy but there were fishable days and fish were caught. September is a strange month because the warm days feel like an extension of summer: plaice, mackerel and bream are still around whereas the colder days warn of the switch to winter species with the arrival of squid and a few early codling.

As a result, catch reports were a real mixed bag with the regulars of rays, bass and bull huss plus some plaice, gilthead bream, brill and even red mullet. Stray codling were reported as early as late August.

By October the mackerel will be heading off although some are usually still around until November. Towards the end of the month we should see some whiting although in recent years they have been arriving well into November. We have a good stock of bass which will still be active and shoaling around the baitfish over banks and harbour entrances. We usually have a visit from trigger fish which are always good for the species count. In fact, for the next month or two almost anything can turn up so have a go, and do share your catch reports here!

2024 Open Cod Competition

06/10/2024 / / 0 Comments

This will be our 7th Open Boat Cod Competition from Southsea Marina and it gets better and better. As usual the First Prize will be a whopping 60% of all the entry money, Second Prize 30% of entry and a table full of runner-up prizes from our generous sponsors. Heaviest cod wins, and if we run out of cod the heaviest whiting will count. Ladies and Junior (under 16) Bonus Prizes too. Sign in at Southsea Marina £10 per angler in cash or online with Eventbrite (booking fee applies). If you book online you do not need to start from the marina, but you will still need to weigh in at the marina. Fishing 8am to 4pm, weigh-in by 5:30pm at the Marina and presentations in the Marina Bar at 6pm.

Please check Eventbrite and Facebook pages for dates. If bad weather causes us to postpone the event, we will roll it forward to the following Sunday. All tickets purchased will be valid for the revised dates.

Entry tickets can be purchased online here

SMAC Meeting October 2024

05/10/2024 / / 0 Comments

Our monthly meetings are consistently popular with members and we had another full room on Tuesday. Steve ran through the Club Standings as usual which are detailed below. Mark Banks is leading the overall Champions Cup with 6 points and Pete Churchill is romping away on the species hunt with 38 recorded so far.

Fish Of The Month was awarded to Pete Churchill for his Gilthead Bream of 2lb 8oz, the only entry that was officially a specimen. He generously donated his winnings to the RNLI fund.

Our Cod Pool stands at 24 with no entries so far. A pool of £240 means even a small cod could be very valuable!

Our next event will be the Inter-Club Competition, this year hosted by ECA. It will be on 6th October (now postponed) or on each following Sunday until the weather allows us to fish.

There will be a talk at the ECA on Tracking Sharks and Rays from 6pm to 8pm on Monday 4th November, all welcome.

The Cod Open Competition will be held on Sunday 17th November, again rolling forward every Sunday if bad weather prevents us getting out.

Our next meeting will be on Tuesday 5th November at 7pm. The Marina Bar Winter Hours will be in place which means the bar will close at 8pm, so no hanging about. We really need someone with a large boat, central heating and a generous stock of drinks to move to A pontoon to give us somewhere to move on to. Any takers?

Looking forward to next year, our Presentation Night (free food, a free drink, prizes and a very decent raffle) will be on Saturday 29th March 2025. This is always a brilliant evening so get there early to bag a seat. Last year the room was rammed an hour before it was due to start!

A suggestion for us to consider at the AGM was to hold a Bass Open. Our Open Competitions always attract a lot of visiting anglers to the marina and this would be an good addition. It would be based on length and Catch & Release, although fish can optionally be retained in line with National rules prevailing.

What will the next month bring – the first cod, terrible weather, who knows? Tight Lines anyway, and see you on 5th November if not before.

July/August Catch Report 2024

06/09/2024 / / 0 Comments

Holidays got in the way of a July Catch Report so here’s a combined edition for the last two months. We were blessed with some great days for boat fishing with relatively calm weather and warm sunshine. Calmer seas and smaller tides meant that some boats could push well out into the Channel, while others still enjoyed great sport but closer to home.

Every summer we hear the same comments: “Where are the mackerel?” and then “There’s loads of mackerel!” It’s true that they can be fickle and locations unpredictable. Where we used to find huge shoals and anything shiny would catch, now the fish are more scattered and feed more selectively but there are still plenty to be caught. You may need to use better quality feathers than the crude strings that were once reliable and also search around to find feeding fish but you should still be able to stock up when needed.

Summer catch reports usually include bass, tope, smoothhound, rays, bream, mullet and huss, with 2024 being no exception. All have been caught and made anglers very happy. Gilthead Bream have featured in more catches recently and they grow to a larger size than Black Bream. There are some impressive fish in the gallery below caught by Peter Churchill (3-6), Wayne Comben (4-7) and Ken Barton (5-9).

Sole need to be deliberately targeted and a calm summer night is the ideal time – if you can find the right mark. Baits need to be hard on the bottom and a lead at each end of the trace helps to keep them the baits in the right place.

You never really know when a codling might appear towards Autumn and one has just scraped into this month’s Report – from the Langstone Run of all places.

Mullet appear in late Spring but are difficult to catch at that time because they are feeding on micro-organisms. Later in Summer they start eating other things including our discarded scraps and this is when you can catch them on baits like bread flake and sweetcorn. I wouldn’t want to eat a mullet that knows what sweetcorn is though.

The Solent area has an amazing variety of species and this makes Species Hunt competitions great fun. We have visits from shoals of herring, and these can even be caught right in the harbours. Tuna have been sighted right by The Forts, and I won’t be surprised if sooner or later one is hooked. That would be a great one for a Species Hunt! I know a spider crab doesn’t count in a Species Hunt but I thought you would like to see an impressive one caught by Mark Banks.

SMAC Meeting September 2024

05/09/2024 / / 0 Comments

We had a very interesting guest talk from The International Seakeepers Society and the University of Portsmouth to start the evening off, and you can read all about it here. We had a great turnout again and our visitors were very appreciative of the interest and support from our members.

On to regular club matters: Steve ran through the current competition standings which are listed below. These can change in an instant, all you need is a good day’s fishing and someone else is in the lead!

Fish Of The Month had a number of entries this time around including some very good fish. The winner is selected based on an unscientific combination of percentage of specimen weight and whether the assembled members think it was a good catch. The winner for September is Pete Churchill with a Gilthead Bream of 3lb 6oz.

We don’t have a date yet for an evening Sole trip, and if anyone has any suggestions for suitable marks without travelling up to Southampton Water please let Dan Lumsden know.

Our next competition will be the Inter Club Competition between SMAC, LHFA and ECA (and Southsea Sea Anglers if they wish). This will be on Sunday 6th October weather permitting, and hosted by last year’s winner ECA.

The Cod Pool is now open, so please make sure your £10 Cod Pool entries are safely with Steve Kelly before registering a cod catch. You might think this is early, but a cod was caught in Langstone Run at the end of August!

The date for the Cod Open will be agreed at the next meeting. We need to make sure we have enough whiting in the sea to fill the prize places this year.

Club merchandise in the form of burgees, caps and beanies can still be purchased from Steve Kelly while stocks last.

Finally, our hosts for the SMAC/SMDAC Pier Competition, Best of British Food recently organised a Junior event and despite horrendous weather, the kids had a great time with some memorable (for them) catches. Many thanks to the organisers and supporters, particularly Cosham Angling. If anyone has any spare rods and reels, they are collecting them for local children to give those who don’t have the means a chance to take up angling.

Next meeting is on Tuesday 1st October, 7pm in the Marina Bar as usual.

Seakeepers, CAST and SMAC

05/09/2024 / / 0 Comments

Southsea Marina Angling Club were delighted to host a talk from the International Seakeepers Society and Dr Christina Hunt at our monthly meeting at Southsea Marina in September.

Gill Rodrigues, Director of International Partnerships introduced Seakeepers which is a non-profit organisation promoting and enabling oceanographic research and education through the yachting and boating community. Seakeepers connect boat owners with researchers so that research projects can be undertaken without the major expense of boat charter, and boat owners can have an active part in supporting marine research and conservation. In addition, Seakeepers have a fleet of yachts which are used as research and education platforms.

Seakeepers are based mainly in the USA, but have UK and Asia-Pacific teams locally. They have an interesting form of funding: when super-yacht owners decide to replace their vessel they gift it to Seakeepers, which in some countries is a tax-deductible transaction. Seakeepers maintain the vessel in their fleet for three years and then sell it on. Unfortunately for SMAC members, supporting this presents us with a bit of a challenge because in the UK the tax concessions are not so generous, nor do any of us have a super yacht to give away.

Even if you don’t have a superyacht to gift or loan for scientist-led expeditions, anyone can be involved in other parts of the Discovery Yacht Program. These include Citizen Science Initiatives such as the one below; Educational Outreach and Community Engagement.

Gill then introduced Dr. Christina Hunt who is leading the Competitive Angling as a Scientific Tool (CAST) project for the University of Portsmouth.   Dr. Hunt explained that the project is to map seabed habitats of five species groups in the eastern Solent area: Bass, Bream, Skates & Rays, Tope and Smoothhound. It is no coincidence that these are the species in the Sea Angling Classic competition because the catch size and location data for all the SAC competitions will be used to analyse the habitats and better understand the connection between the underwater topography and species movements.  

Dr. Hunt is looking for volunteers to map the seabed in a number of specific locations using Lowrance or Simrad sonar. This hardware restriction is because the data analytics software is based on data formats from these manufacturers. For more details of the project and to get involved please see here

There is another project under way at the University of Portsmouth which is to develop an AI model to calculate fish length from a photographic image. To help the robot “learn”, it needs to look at a lot of fish photographs with a length ruler so if anyone has any such photographs from past catches please forward them to Dr. Christina Hunt.

SMAC would like to thank Gill Rodrigues and Megan Hickling from Seakeepers and Dr. Christina Hunt from the University of Portsmouth for a very interesting talk. We hope to keep in touch with both Seakeepers and the University of Portsmouth researchers so that we can help in these and future projects. Marine conservation needs to be based on knowledge, and sea anglers have a great interest in supporting both the research processes and conservation outcomes.

Useful links:

www.seakeepers.org

https://castproject.co.uk

https://www.seakeepers.org/program-opportunities/competitive-angling

SMAC September 2024 see the full Monthly Meeting Report here.

SMAC September Monthly Meeting

29/08/2024 / / 0 Comments

Our next meeting will be at 7pm on Tuesday 3rd September in the Marina Bar. This month we will have an introductory talk from The International Seakeepers Society, a marine conservation organisation that promotes research, conservation and education through the marine leisure community. They are currently recruiting volunteers from local anglers to undertake some research into bass and bream habitats around the Solent on behalf of a research project by the University of Portsmouth. Come along and hear more about it! The talk will be followed by our usual agenda – Fish Of The Month, events, competition standings and possibly some beer and banter too.

SMAC Species Competition 2024

12/08/2024 / / 0 Comments

This is one of only three Open Competitions that SMAC organises, and although the summer fixture has to compete with family holidays, it is probably the one with the most chances of winning because you can catch multiple species right here in the harbour! Even expert anglers sometimes find it hard to collect enough species on the day.

The day dawned rather foggy, but after a tentative start the sun broke through and 22 anglers in 13 boats took part. Proof of the sun was the sea of pink faces in the Marina Bar for prizegiving. The aim is to catch the most species, with a tie-break scoring system and failing that, a roll of the dice. We used all three methods to come up with the prize winners. By tradition, last year’s winner gives out the prizes and as Peter Churchill won last year and is hotly contended by Dan Lumsden for all species hunts, the results were going to be interesting.

We had no Junior entries so the bonus prize was the Ladies Prize won by Pam Eckersall with 3 species.

Here is the final tally:

1st Dan Lumsden – 11 species
2nd Peter Churchill – 9 species
3rd Steve Tambling – 8 species tie-break score 17
4th Neville Merritt – 8 species tie-break score 9
5th Luke Scott – 7 species tie-break score 12
6th Tim Ward – 7 species tiebreak score 5
7th Michael Chapman – 6 species
8th Kev Laverick – 5 species tiebreak score 4
9th Terry Webster – 5 species (dice)
10th Dave Chapman – 5 species (dice)

Ladies Bonus Prize Pam Eckersall

Our thanks as always to our prize sponsors including: Premier Marinas, Cosham Angling, Baits ‘R Us, Fish-On Bait & Tackle, Newnham Builders, SMDAC, Prestige Builders, Sportsman’s Knight, British Big Game Charters and the Marina Bar – and many thanks also to our Club Chairman Steve Kelly for organising yet another very successful event.

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