Category: Catch Reports 2024

February is traditionally a very slow month and this year it was even slower than usual, with poor weather and ever poorer fishing. In fact most of February and March can be described as dogfish, dogfish, conger, dogfish. A few settled days allowed the long-distance boats like Harvest Moon to head for the wrecks, and some good pollack were brought to the boats.  Nearer shore we were looking for plaice, but few appeared. We expect bream to arrive in Spring but bream in early March was a surprise. The bream season seems to be much longer than it ever was, which is a sign of the changes going on around us.  As you can see from the photo gallery below, if you managed to get baits past the dogfish and conger there are still a few other species there including ray, spurdog, early smoothhound and a bonus brill!

This is the last month of the 2023 year for Southsea Marina Angling Club and the first month of 2024 for the rest of the entire planet. The 2023 SMAC Cod Open Competition was rolled forward to 14th January as a result of a string of windy Sundays in November and December. As you will see from the report, cod and whiting were extremely hard to find on the day but at least the whiting have been more plentiful on other days in January. From personal experience and chatting to others, the size of the larger whiting has been smaller than in previous years but there are still plenty of pin whiting around to destroy baits.

If you picked a good day and the right wreck, pollack sport was there to be had but again, smaller and fewer than in previous years. We’ll see what the debate around the ICES pollack stock assessment leads to, because it’s looking like it might follow a similar pattern to the current bass stock protection measures in future.

The waters around the Solent hold an enormous variety of fish species, as evidenced by the SMAC Annual Species Hunt. Joint winners were Peter Churchill and Dan Lumsden with 47 species each, and if you would like to see a selection have a look at the gallery below. It shows you can have a lot of fun without needing to go far or catch huge fish. The total tally for different species across the entire club was 54.

One of the reasons why we have such a variety is that the Wight area is affected by two major water and fish movements – from the North Sea to the east of us and the Atlantic to the west. This water movement accounts for the double high water between Southampton and Poole. It is why we get herring, plaice, cod and whiting from the North Sea in winter and spring, and many warm water fish species arriving for the summer from southern waters.

This also helps to explain why local boats going as far as Brighton were catching early plaice in January, although they had just spawned and were very skinny. They will hopefully fatten up and move further west to our more local marks.

Many angling boats come out of the water for annual maintenance in February because the weather is often miserable and catches dominated by tiny whiting and dogfish. We are often tempted to go out anyway then wonder why we bothered. But you never know…that’s why we do it.

***Reminder: Bass regulations in force require all bass caught in February and March to be returned quickly and unharmed. Bass may only be retained from April onwards, and the daily catch limit then will be 2 bass per angler per day, minimum 42cm length.***