National fishing day

It's been a while since I have posted a blog. Couple of reasons for that. The main reason is that I was diagnosed with a shoulder injury recently and the injury has kept me away from fishing since February. I'm currently waiting to receive some specialised treatment on the injury but until then, I am pretty well sidelined as far as fishing goes. In fact, today is only the second time I've been fishing since end January & today's session on 'national fishing day' (otherwise translated as royal wedding day) was only a few hours worth of fishing with my good friend Jason & yet again, he showed me how to winkle out a nice pike from the local fishing hole. Although Jason can take the credit for the catch, it was almost certainly my surface popping lure that got Mr Pikes attention & Jason was skillful enough to cast his plug right over the area I had just 'prepped' for him & he was able to coax a very nice jack out from the water.

We continued to wonder round looking for suitable fishy looking areas & although we found plenty of likely looking spots, none produced any offers. Mother nature however, was showing off all her beauty and today we had a wonderful bonus of observing bream in the shallows getting ready to spawn. It was truly a mesmerising sight & one I had never been privileged to see before. Unfortunately for me, my shoulder was causing me considerable pain & carrying a back pack & casting into a stiff headwind was proving more & more uncomfortable for me & so I ended up calling it a day not long into the afternoon.
In less than 2 months, I am having a short trip away with my 2 friends up to the west coast of Scotland in search of large pollack from the shore. I always look forward to a few treasured days away with my friends from the North East. It takes quite a bit of planning and we need that little bit of luck with the weather, but it's always nice to get away from work regardless of what nature throws at us and if we get lucky with a few pollack, then even better.
I caught up with my friends in the North East a couple of weekends ago & we got down to some serious planning whilst spending a few hours aboard my friends boat - 'Wor Lass'. And boy were we lucky with the weather for the planned afternoon in the North Sea a few miles out of the Tyne. Conditions were perfect - very light winds, glorious sunshine and rather warm for the time of year. As we motored out of the Tyne, we kept a close eye on the sonar & before long we were sitting over the first wreck & it produced a couple of fish for us. Using light tackle made the whole experience even more enjoyable but nonetheless hard work winching 3-4lb codling from 100feet. A few hours later, all 3 of us had a nice bag of 4 codling each-a nice share of the spoils & good reward for an afternoons inshore wrecking.

My only sorrow is that I live so far away from my North East friends that it is not easy for me to get time up to see my friends as often as I would like-and the current price of fuel means that for me, those trips will be few & far between. I'll eagerly await the updated reports from my friends as to how well they are doing when they get out in the boat.
Meanwhile, I will have to make do with getting my mullet tackle ready for the arrival of the thick lipped mullet in my local river. They should be starting to show in large numbers in the next week/10 days & with treatment on my shoulder only 19 days away, I'm looking forward to getting back into the swing of things.