Red letter day

It is an over used title for sure. I'm sure most of us as anglers have had at least one red letter day. That special fishing trip where we caught unforgettable fish or weight of fish. I've had a few red letter days in my fishing life. I've had spectacular codling sessions from the shore when conditions were perfect, I've had great cod sessions when conditions looked unfishable, but I adapted to those conditions & had some great catches. I've also had superb salmon sessions with one memorable red letter day when I had 2 salmon & 2 sea trout in half an hour-the salmon were 12 & 14lb & the sea trout 6lb & 4lb. Those days will live with me for the rest of my life, but the latest red letter day on the west coast of Scotland ranks up there with the best of them.
The day started like the previous morning-a few sleepy looking characters waking up to a full English breakfast and a good cup of coffee. We then discussed where we would fish. Conditions were quite different to the previous day-gone was the clear blue sky & light winds. We now had over cast skies, a bit more wind & it was a lot cooler. Steven has always been of the opinion that sunshine & flat seas are not good for pollack fishing. After the previous days disapointing session in those conditions, I was coming round to agree with him. And so we all agreed we would have to return to the mark we fished when we arrived. It would mean a bit of a hike across fields again, but we'd have daylight this time & we knew the area we would be fishing.
Which leads me onto the tackle we use. I haven't mentioned the specific gear we use for our pollack fishing-it seems like a good time to go in to that. My own personal choice is for a good beefy carp rod-12 ft 3lb test curve as standard. I have found the TF range of carp rods suit these needs perfectly as these give me great feedback & power when I need it. For the reel, I prefer a Shimano fixed spool reel. I find these are dependable, strong & have superb clutches. I've never had any problems with shimano reels & have used them for 20 years now. Choice of line is extremely important for us & I've been a fan of braid for many years now. It's direct response is just wonderful. I'd just invested in some whiplash braid but I was finding that it wasn't quite responding well to hard casting. I decided to go back to using one of my spare shimano reels loaded with fireline-which I find is a much more resistant to my style of hard casting. But that's down to choice. I prefer to use 17lb braid-purely because of habit. I used to use 17lb nylon or co-polymer & the diameter was just right to fill up the spool on the reel with. Obviously with braid you get more bang for your buck, but I've never changed the breaking strain & so I stuck with 17lb mainline. The business end of the gear is as simple as you can get. There's no point making anything complicated for pollack. You have to get down deep for them & you are fishing rough ground. If you get too fancy with rigs & end tackle, you just end up asking for problems. So keep it nice & simple. I use 1oz ball leads straight on the main line with a small bead running up to a swivel. A 2 or 3 foot rubbing leader is then tied direct - usually about the same breaking strain as the main line. If you are using frozen sandeel, a 3/0 or 4/0 hook is tied direct. I have experimented with using the leads on a sacrificial drop line-still running through the main line but in the event of a snag, there is a good chance the weight will snap still leaving you connected to the fish.
Kevin prefers to use an 8 foot beach caster tip section & reducer butt coupled with a 6500 size multiplier & 30lb braid. I used to think that was too much for the fish, but Kevins approach gives great security & can easily deal with one of those unexpected biggies that we are sure we will connect with. It works for Kevin.
Steven uses a similar set up to me-carp rod, fixed spool reel & also 30lb braid. As it would turn out, the lads choice of braid was probably a wiser choice than mine.They had that extra security to increase their rubbing hook leader to 20-25lb whereas I was limited to 17lb or less. A good haversack or hiking backpack, some containers to carry weights, hooks & odd bits and a good assortment of lures & you are good to go. As far as the lures went, we had built up a substantial assortment of different & favorite lures over the years. My recent favoured lures were of the slug type. There are slug-n-go eels that give superb action in the water, and there are also hogeys which are similar in make but give an astonishing action when worked in the water. Fished texas style, they give a little bit of extra help when fished deep as the hook is fished upwards & therefore avoids immediate hook ups in weed & rocks. We also love using redgills with red & natural a firm favorite but we had also got some newer versions to try-blue mackerel & glow in the dark versions. Would they work on the pollack? We'd have to wait to see.
We packed the haversacks with an assortment of lures, some waterproofs & food & drink. I'd brought some Asda pork pies for lunch on the rocks. We loaded the car with the gear & set off for a relatively short drive to the mark we fished 2 days earlier. Although it was overcast & cooler than the day before, it was still a good day to fish. As we drove up to the small car park area, we happened to bump into the farmer we saw on the night we arrived. We thanked him for such wonderful information & he divulged some further information on the better of the 2 marks. We were getting very excited about this & we had high hopes of a good day ahead.
We set off in search of the mark-through the fields, looking for landmarks & avoiding the rabbit holes that were abundant in the area. As someone who has suffered more than his fair share of sprained ankles, I am extra cautions about walking over ground like this as one misplaced step will result in me spending the next few hours in some casualty department waiting to get one of those expandable ankle socks. I really didn't want that this time.
After an hour of pretty stiff walking, we had failed to find the better mark & so we had agreed to go to the mark we started at 2 days previously. It was a fairly comfortable mark to fish and didn't seem that brutal on the end gear. Having had a very good couple of hours there previously, we all wondered if it would produce the same sort of fishing over a longer spell & during the day rather than in the evening. The sea was a little choppier than before & it was certainly not t-shirt weather so a coat & jumper were needed to keep the cool wind off. We chose our first cast baits & lures & got ready to send the first casts seaward. I was starting off with rubber lures again-a hogey this time. I also had flashbacks to the seal attack & scanned the sea for any sign of a bobbing head-just in case. There seemed to be no sign of the seal & so we aimed our cast seaward & crossed our fingers.

The first few casts produced nothing. Was this a good idea? Then, suddenly Kevin & Steven got some action-the frozen sandeels were doing their job. Then my shimmer eel got hit by my first pollack. Steven & Kevin were getting almost a fish a cast. I decided to move slightly down from them onto a more exposed point which was on the corner of a bay. That worked for me. I started to get some hard takes from pollack averaging 4lb each. We were also having to deal with changing currents. One minute the current was pulling slack, then it began to pick up to a much stronger level & we then found our lures and weights getting hung up on a ledge that was about 10-15 yards out. But the pollack were also sitting on this ledge so it was a trade off. Speed up the retrieve before the ledge & avoid the inevitable snag, or keep the lure working & tempt a take from the pollack. The frozen sandeel continued to keep a steady rate of hits for Steven & Kevin whilst I persisted with a variety of latex immitations. Steve & Kevin were also at an advantage to me because they had sensibly stepped up their mainline to 30lb braid which gave them a much greater chance of bullying a fish out of the ledge & kelp. Kevin's beachcaster tip set up also enabled him to really bully stubborn fish out.

Steven decided to change to a red redgill & this was an inspired change. 8 fish in 9 casts came in from that. Kevin continued to haul out pollack on his reliable & beefed up outfit & then produced a small ling on a frozen sandeel. That was a first for us-we'd never seen that before. By mid afternoon, after several hours of arm wrenching pollack action, I called for lunch-much to the annoyance of the lads who were reluctant to give up their fish a cast average. But the promise of an Asda pork pie was enough to get them both to have a rest for 20 minutes & we chatted about the mornings action. For sure, we'd not experienced anything like this before and we were keen to get started after lunch.

However, things went strangely quiet & for the first 5-10 minutes, we didn't get any hits. I was beginning to think that lunch was perhaps a bad idea & then the fun started again. The fish were back on the take & we were getting 2 & 3 ups.
The tide hit top water & the actions slowed down, but once the tide began to shift & the current picked up again, the fish were still keen to take. We all moved up & down the rock mark, finding different platforms to cast from. By about 7pm, we'd noticed a very positive drop off in takes & we decided to call it a day. A red letter day at that. We all reckoned we had landed 30 fish each-and that was being conservative. At an average of 3lb a fish and allowing for the odd bigger fish that we had all had, we estimated that we had landed 300lb of pollack between us. By any standards, that is a phenomenal haul and made the walk back (not as boggy as the previous visit) all the more sweeter. And to round off the day, circling over the car was an eagle. We're not that good at wibbly-wob spotting so none of knew for sure what kind of eagle it was, but it rounded off the perfect day. And for tea, it was a home made chilli, washed down with a few bottles of cold beer. What better way to finish off the day. The only downside was the forecast for our last day-end of the world stuff. Gale force winds and persistent rain. It was not going to be a pleasant day to finish our short trip on, but we'd come to fish & fish we would.