Kayak fishing on the Manacles

I managed to get 5 hrs fishing in today off my RTM Disco Kayak after spending yesterday plotting reefs and wrecks onto my new Garmin 60 GPS.

I headed to Porthoustock and launched towards the Manacles, about 1 mile from the beach. The conditions were great, sunny, slight swell, light winds and small tides. Ideal for a first explore of a location.

On getting there I headed towards a point and lowered a string of 3 lures, flashing Mackerel lures as I didn’t have a lot of tackle with me. BANG went the rod and I hauled up a Pollock, ¾ to 1lb in weight. I unhooked this and lowered the rig down again this time bringing up a Launce.

I decided to free line the Launce for a while, drifting off the back of Vase rock but I didn’t catch. Next time I will fish the Launce hard to the bottom instead of free lining it.

I released my Launce and attached the string of lures and headed back towards the Vase rocks. There were dive boats working in front of me and a couple of private fishing boats to my side. I noticed that I was drifting at about ½ the speed of most craft, which was giving me longer in the fish zones, but I did have to give way to the Bigger boats. I got close about 3 times to what I thought was the crown of rocks breaking the surface, then I noticed as I almost hit on that it was in fact Mullet in huge rafts. The number of the fish was immeasurable and the size of the individual mullet I could see were 2-4lbs. I have never seen Mullet behave like this in the open sea before. I have seen it in Torquay marina many years ago. The Kayak was so stealthy that I could almost float over them without them diving for cover. To just see this one sight today was worth it.

The other thing I noticed was seabirds including groups of flying Razor Bill took little or no notice of me. They would fly so close I could hear their feathers cutting through the air.

I digress – I decided to try a few wrecks and reefs that I plotted. The first two drifts were over reefs that I have found. I managed 3 Cuckoo Wrasse the first drift all falling to baited feather and of a good size. The next drift saw 2 more Cuckoo Wrasse and a Scad.

At this point it was about 14:00 hrs and I headed back to shore for a rest.

Heading out to sea again on my Kayak and I decided to fish some ground in the other direction. I had an old wreck marked on my GPS after talking with some divers on the beach. I headed of to The Volnay.

I fished this mark about 5 times on slightly different drifts, but to no avail. The fish just didn’t want to show for me. I then spent about 2 hrs trolling a set of Mackerel lures, following the commercial boats. I could easily stay at 2knts which seemed about the same as the commercial mackerel fishermen. But I had no success.

All in all it was a great day on the Kayak and the first real effort to fish from the Kayak with intent. I covered 6.44 nautical miles, my max speed was 4.8 kts I was moving for 4hrs:38mins and stationary for 54mins :55secs and my average moving speed was1.4 kts.