Even more species hunting adventures on Lanzarote: Part 1.

At the end of November, I flew down to Lanzarote in the Canary Islands with two of my mates, Nick and Ryan, for a week of species hunting. I've been twice before and Nick was with me the last time I visited the island, but for Ryan it was his first real foreign holiday. We were all looking forward to the trip, and three sets of tackle went with us. Ultralight gear would be used most of the time and would no doubt account for most of the species we would catch, but we also took heavy lure gear to use at dawn and dusk for barracuda and bonito and finally three heavy beachcasters, so we could fish after dark for stingrays and other shark species.

The day before we left we checked the weather and to be honest it left us feeling a little bit deflated. High winds building up over a number of days with a fair bit of rain also forecast and couple of days of thunderstorms thrown in to the mix as well. Certainly not the type of weather you expect when you fly down to that part of the world! Anyway, we were still determined to make the most of the trip even if we may have to temper our expectations. Arriving in the evening after the sun had set we quickly picked up the hire car from the airport, drove to a supermarket to get some food and bait, found our apartment, grabbed the ultralight gear out of our luggage and hit Playa Chica pier for a couple of hours.

It was a pleasant, warm evening and turned out to be a fairly busy if short session. We had raw prawns and squid to use as bait, with the latter proving much the more effective choice. Fishing the bottom few feet  of the water column, we caught a few bogue, common two banded seabream, white seabream, blue jack mackerel, axillary seabream, a Madeira rockfish and one of my favourite nocturnal mini species, cardinalfish.

The cardinalfish. These little red rubies come out to feed after dark.;

Catching seven different species was a good start to our species hunting. With over a hundred species possible, I’d set us a fairly ambitious group target of fifty species for the week, but given the weather that was coming our way we all agreed to forget that and just enjoy whatever fishing we managed to do as the conditions might restrict our opportunities during our stay. Back at the apartment we went straight to bed as we had an early start planned the following morning. We wanted to head down to the back of Puerto del Carmen harbour for a few hours, targeting primarily barracuda.

Down on the rocks before sunrise, we thrashed the deep water in front of us with various plugs, soft plastics and metal jigs. I think it's more a case of being in the right place at the right time than anything else, and sadly we had no luck in that respect. We decided to put the lure rods away once the sun had been up for a while and headed along to the rocks at the mouth of the harbour armed with our ultralight gear and some bait.

Not an entirely unproductive morning on the heavy lure rods, various new lures were tested and also got a thorough wash.

After scrambling down the rocks from the clifftop path, we got into some fish straight away. Nick fished in a deep gully fairly close in.

Ryan and I cast as far as we could out into the entrance of the harbour.

None of us were shocked when we all caught our first ornate wrasse of the trip. Unsurprisingly, they made up the bulk of our catches over the remainder of the week.

We added a few more species to our tally in the shape of a common pandora…

…a ringneck blenny…

…and a couch’s seabream.

We also caught a black goby, some Guinean puffer and a blacktail comber before we decided it was getting too hot and the action slowed right down, the fish obviously agreeing with our assessment of the rising temperature. A bit sweaty we headed back to the apartment for some lunch and a siesta.

At about 17:00 we put our beachcasters in the car and headed south to check out a couple of stingray marks. The wind had really started to blow and as a result the first mark, a long beach, was being battered by a large swell, making fishing virtually impossible. The second mark was slightly better as it offered some protection from the wind, but there was still a bit of swell running so it was far from ideal. We gave it a go anyway and three up and over rigs baited with sardine were cast out onto a sandy area beyond the rocks, but after a couple of hours the conditions deteriorated further and when it started raining we all got a bit of a soaking and decided pack up. Even if we hooked a fish it would have been a nightmare trying to land it. At least we had seen what the mark was like before the sun had set and if conditions improved we could return later in the week to that part of the island.

By the time we got back to Puerto del Carmen the wind had really picked up, and it rained heavily most of the rest of the evening, so we chilled out in the apartment and had a few beers with the intention of making another early start the next day. When our alarm clocks went off, it was raining heavily again, so we had a couple more hours in bed and waited for it to stop before heading down to Playa Chica pier for another session there. When we got down there it was absolutely mobbed with divers though, more divers than I’ve ever seen there in fact, so we headed west to fish from some rocks near the mouth of Puerto Calero Marina instead. It’s a spot that usually throws up a good variety of species, but all we caught were dozens of ornate wrasse, some puffer and a few Madeira goby. The Madeira goby did add another species to our group tally. The tally that, as the three of us had discussed, I definitely wasn't keeping a track of.

Living on the wrong island.

In the afternoon, we decided to try a new spot further up the eastern side of the island to hopefully stay out of the wind. A small stone pier in Punta Mujeres was chosen, and it proved to be a very good spot, comfortable to fish from, providing lots of ultralight sport and adding several species to our haul.

There were lots of puffer fish in the area. Mainly Guinean puffer…

…but also the odd Macronesian sharpnose puffer too. They're more colourful with various shades of blue spots on them and are a little nicer to look at, but still a super aggressive, bait stripping pest.

One fairly small shallower area off to the right of the pier held quite a lot of annular seabream.

Nick and I both caught a single planehead filefish each.

Ryan also caught a wide eyed flounder.

We fished there until we ran out of bait, adding an Atlantic lizardfish, some Canary damsel, an Azores damsel and a couple of emerald wrasse to the species we’d already caught. We also watched several large stingray swim past the base of the pier and head out off into deeper water. So we had also stumbled upon another potential mark to fish for them if the conditions were right. On our way back to Puerto del Carmen we also checked out Playa de la Garita, a black sand beach not too far from Punta Mujeres, that we figured might also be a reasonably comfortable place to fish for stingray after dark. It had been a productive day and our trip tally, which we’d all completely forgotten about because we were all just focusing on having fun, was now a respectable twenty three.

After dinner, we discussed our options for the next few days after checking the weather forecast again. The following day it was due to improve a bit, with the wind dropping off slightly, so we decided to book seats on the first ferry to take us over to La Graciosa in the morning. There we planned to spend the day fishing into deep water with our heavy lure rods to see if we could catch some bigger fish.

Up early the next day, we drove up to Órzola on the north coast and took the thirty minute ferry over to La Graciosa. It's a very small island and has no proper roads, so 4x4 jeeps are the only means of transport available. Speaking to the drivers of these off road taxis, they warned us against fishing from the two marks I told them we were interested in going to, saying that the swell was too big on them both for us to fish safely, instead they helpfully suggested an alternative which we then drove to. It was a bumpy ride in the back of the old Land Rover, but after about twenty minutes we were dropped off and given directions to the mark, which required a short walk north along the rocky shoreline. Arriving at the small peninsula, it didn’t look anything special or particularly deep, but we got our gear set up and started fishing with various lures. The weather forecast had predicted a dry day, but the grey clouds overhead had other ideas, and we got soaked to the skin three times. Each time the rain stopped, it gave us the chance to dry off a bit before it started again, drenching us once more. To make matters worse, none of us had any interest in any lure from any fish that may have been around.

More jigs, plugs and soft plastics being cleaned until absolutely spotless. Shirt, shorts and trainers also got given a good wash too. Repeatedly.

Eventually the rain stopped and stayed off, and having tried various different types of lures with no success, I switched over to ultralight tackle and kicked a few whelks off the rocks to use as bait. This rather predictably produced endless ornate wrasse and puffer. Occasionally, a different species did manage to reach the bait first, breaking up the monotony.

I caught our first diamond lizardfish of the trip. They seem to prefer living in rocky habitat, unlike their cousin, the Atlantic lizardfish, which prefers clean sand.

I also caught a solitary common comber from the rocky bottom in front of us.

Switching to a split shot rig and dropping my whelk bait into rockpools that appeared as the tide dropped, produced some rockpool blenny.

Shortly before we had to leave, I also got broken off by what I suspect was a grey triggerfish. We saw one following an ornate wrasse up as I wound that in and on my next drop I hooked something that powered off when I set the hook. Heading underneath a ledge, I had no choice but to apply some pressure to try and bully it away from the snag. As soon as I did though, my rig failed at the loop knot that I had used to create my hooklength. Landing a grey triggerfish would have been a new species for me, so I was pretty gutted, but being busted up by larger fish is always a risk when you fish with ultralight tackle. 

To their credit, despite not getting any interest in their lures all day, Nick and Ryan both persisted with the heavy lure gear until it was time to head back to the dirt track road to get picked up to be taken back to Caleta del Sebo harbour. Another short bumpy ride later we arrived back at the port. As we had just under an hour or so to kill before our ferry left, we fished with our ultralight tackle from boulders at the back of the harbour breakwater, where we all caught some ornate wrasse and Guinean puffer. It had been a bit of a disappointing day trip really but at least none of us blanked on La Graciosa and the rain had stayed off too, so by the time we caught the ferry back to Lanzarote we were all fairly dry.

Arriving back in Puerto del Carmen we got freshened up and headed out that evening for a meal and a “few” drinks.

Things started a little messy when Ryan returned from the bar with these cocktails.

The meal was great and we had a great laugh visiting a few pubs before returning to the apartment where we carried on drinking for a few hours. As we didn’t go to bed until very late, there would be no early start the next day. This marked the midway point of the trip and whilst the weather hadn’t been great, we’d certainly tried to make the most of things and had caught twenty six species in the process. Not bad really, all things considered.

Tight lines, Scott.

Click here for part 2.