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Fort D'Auvergne 12th Aug 2006
Map Ref: 656,477
Tide: HW 9.30am (11.4m)
Weather Forecast: Sunny Periods. Wind NW wind 12mph Gusts to 23mph
Collected Chris from Five Oaks around 6am, drove down to St Helier, parked the car and walked down to the Hotel….
We arrived at the rock a little early … well about an hour if truth be told….. the tide was well out, and had only just turned for the flood…..
There were a couple of chaps fishing on the beach below…. Looked like they were ground fishing for bass….
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Took our time to set-up and wait, with a couple of cups of coffee, small talk about fishing for the golden greys we hoped the tide would bring….. and watched the bass anglers… didn't see them land anything…
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By 7.15 we could start fishing, but the combination of weed, swell, and tidal run made life very difficult to start with…..
7.25am… had a cracking bit, but failed to connect to the perpetrator…
7.45am…. Chris pulled up a small smelt of about 5” …. Dropped off and saved him the bother of having to unhook it….
We could just make out the odd flashes of better fish below, but couldn't really tell how big or small they really were….
7.55am …. My turn to lift out a 5” smelt ….. again allowed it to drop off…. Smelt were not really what we had come down for!!!!
More and more small fish seemed to be arriving every minute… the front edge of the rock was packed with sand smelt, and slightly further out small torpedo mullet could be seen darting in and out of the ground baited areas….
By 8.30am, I decided to try deeper - around 10ft or so, in the hope of getting past the smaller fish…. Managed to break my powergum stop knot in the process and had to take time out to do a new one…
8.45am …. Chris decided to move up behind me to fish to the right hand side, and about 10 minutes later I moved forward to the front edge to take up jippering duty and have a go for the mullet straight out….
9.25am…. Chris has another small sand smelt……
9.45am…. I managed a larger 7” sand smelt …. Decided it wasn't worth clambering back over the rock to my bag to get the camera, so I popped the fish back there and then….
10.10am….. really annoyed with myself at missing probably my best bite of the day so far… that's life!!! Not long after however the possible culprits made themselves known… a groups of about 6 to 8 torpedo mullet around 10” or so…..
Decided to cast further out over both the smelt and small mullet in order to get at larger fish… or that was the hope anyway….
10.20am…. my float shot under… I struck …. Far too hard…. Hit home, but my over zealous action resulted in the line parting (were it had been weakened by one of the swan split shot) and the float popping out of its holder, and bobbed away in the distance!!!! I was not best pleased with myself for fairly obvious reasons!!!!
For about another hour we both had bites that we failed to connect with…. A number of small mullet (6 to 8 maybe) around the half pond mark showed up, and kept us entertained by zooming around for the groundbait, but again failed to hook them despite getting some terrific bites….. Chris with his higher vantage point did see a larger mullet, but it just swam through and never returned….
By 11.30am with dropping water levels, and no sign of any sizable, let alone decent mullet around for us to potentially catch, we decided to call it a day…… rather down hearted with our hopes of more goldens dashed......