Even More Species Hunting Adventures On Gran Canaria: Part 2.

Early on day three, we headed south again, away from the strong winds that were coming from the north east. Again, our first stop was the small pond in Maspalomas. When we arrived, another angler was already at the  water's edge, fishing away.

No rod required! A little egret stalking its quarry.

Armed with tanago hooks and some bread, we quickly set about locating the suspected convict cichlids that I thought I'd spotted two days previously. It didn't take too long to spot a few, they're pretty distinctive little fish with bold stripes, and they moved around differently to the Mozambique tilapia too, hiding in the rocks in the shallow margins, close to the bottom. Given we were being a little bit naughty again, we caught a few and left before anyone noticed us. It was a fun way to start the day, I'd caught my first new species of the trip into the bargain, and Ed had caught his first convict cichlid too!

Does the fact that they have been released into the pond makes them former convict cichlids?

Heading back to Puerto de Mogan, we began the session fishing in the small tidal channel that runs out through the town to the sea, separated from the beach by a small rocky breakwater. Our target species from one of the blue metal bridges crossing over it, were mullet, and when we arrived, there were plenty of them around. Mainly small golden grey mullet, which we both quickly caught on freelined small pieces of bread flake, another new species for Ed. I also spotted a few that were bigger, a shade of light brown across their back and with yellow anal fins and edges on their tail fins too. We'd stumbled across some flathead mullet, a species I'd seen a solitary example of only once briefly before, last month whilst I was on Fuerteventura. With a bit of persistence, I managed to catch three of them.

My first ever flathead mullet and my second new species of the trip!

They have a very sort snout whose length is less than the diameter of the eye and have thin lips which have tiny serrated "teeth" on them that are just visible in this photo. Another key identifying feature is a well developed adipose eyelid, also shown in this photo. The base of the pectoral fin has a dark spot and when bent forward the pectoral fin reached past the rear edge of the eye.

In the water, the yellow markings on their anal fin and the lower edge of their tail are quite obvious, making targeting them specifically in a shoal of mixed mullet species slightly easier.

Ed tried his best to catch one too, but after a while the fish all became very wary, so we moved down to the end of the channel onto the small rocky breakwater on its left hand side. There, we set about lowering split shot rigs baited with small pieces of prawn into gaps in the rocks. My target species was a hairy blenny, and after pulling an ornate wrasse, a Canary damselfish and a Madeira rockfish out of one particularly deep hole, I caught one. Ed really wanted one too, but after trying for a while longer with no success, we opted to move again.

I find deep dark holes in rocks and boulder are a great place to catch hairy blenny.

They don't look very hairy out of the water, but when submerged, it becomes quite apparent why they are so named.

Heading around to the fish from the outside of the beach's breakwater again, my mind turned once again to catching a red banded bream. Once again the fishing was nothing special with some very quiet periods, but again we caught a few fish and were slowly adding more species to our trip's tally as we did.

There were lots of puffer around, like this Macaronesian sharpnose puffer. They are expert bait stealers, and a lot of the time you don't even feel them doing it! Regular bait checks were the order of the day. No bites after a short period usually meant a bare hook.

I caught lots of these Guinean puffer, but for some reason Ed only caught the more colourful Macaronesian sharpnose puffer.

Planehead filefish are also pretty skilled at stripping bait, with their small mouths and sharp teeth.

Casting out as far as I could, I caught a few blacktail comber. They definitely don't mess about nibbling at a bait!

From closer in, I managed to catch a huge redlip blenny by speculatively dropping my rig onto a rock that seemed to be a stopping point for a few of them. It was out of sight when this fish took my bait. It's the first time I've caught one without actually seeing them take my bait.

Like most blenny species, they can be pretty aggressive when being unhooked and handled. I wouldn't want those fangs in my finger, that's for sure!

On the way back to our apartment in Arinaga, we stopped at the bright glasseye spot again, but if anything the conditions had deteriorated, so we decided not to even bother trying. Checking when we got back, I noticed that the weather forecast had changed slightly towards the end of our stay and the wind was due to drop off the day before we were leaving. Hopefully, this might provide one opportunity to revisit and target them. We decided the following day to start the day off by trying to fish somewhere completely new that I had never visited before.

Tight lines, Scott.

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More Species Hunting Adventues On Gran Canaria & Fuerteventura: Part 2.

The next stop on our first full day on Gran Canaria was quite similar to the one before, another breakwater for a busy beach. This time, it was the eastern breakwater of Playa de Amadores. Also constructed from very large boulders, the end section is lower down that the start and concrete has been poured in between the boulders, making for a comfortable fishing experience, with no risk of tackle boxes going down into gaps, never to be seen again. After finding a spot, we began fishing, and quickly caught a few puffers, Canary damselfish and our first ornate wrasse of the trip.

I remember catching an ornate wrasse for the first time and how excited I was! They are still a beautiful species, but over a decade and several hundred ornate wrasse later, I don't quite get the same buzz.

After a while, I took a short break from fishing in the sea to quickly raid some small man made “concrete and rock” pools behind us. You can't ignore small bodies of water and the species they hold when you're on a species hunt.

It didn’t take more than five minutes for me to tempt a few Madeira goby..

...and rockpool blenny, taking our tally into double figures.

Returning to fishing in the sea, I turned my attention to the numerous redlip blenny that were sitting on submerged boulders all along the edge of the breakwater. Predominantly an algae eater, I find them difficult to catch. They generally either ignore your bait, or simply swim off as it lands in their vicinity. Eventually, I dropped my prawn down in front of one large specimen that actually seemed interested/agitated by its sudden arrival in its proximity. The only problem being that a large swarm of other, much more aggressive species, would dart over and fight over the bait, spooking my target in the process. I persisted for well over an hour. Failing to hook the fish a few times in between catching several other "pest" species. I thought it might lose interest, but I think it was acting out of aggression, defending its territory, rather than trying to eat my bait. Eventually my perseverance paid off though, and I managed to strike fast enough to hook only my second ever redlip blenny. It was wound in rapidly and quickly swing up into my waiting hand! I was so excited to catch it, Gordon asked me if it was a new species!

One of my favourite blenny species. Big and chunky, they're up there with the tompot blenny in terms of character, in my opinion anyway. 

Their top lip is a large flap that it drags along rocks to harvest the algae from them. A very fussy eater. 

Such a funky face and their eyes move independently too, making for some entertaining expressions. 

To end the day, we headed to a small harbour back up the east coast of the island, reasonably close to our accommodation. The main target species there was glasseye, a member of the bigeye family. They are a nocturnal fish ,that lives in caves and down in amongst breakwater boulders during the day, coming out to feed at night.

Our target species, the glasseye.

We fished for a couple of hours, most of which I spent shining my headtorch around, hoping to catch the reflections from the large eyes of our target species. Sadly, they didn’t seem to be present, so we turned our attention to fishing on the bottom over a sandy area. We caught a few bastard grunt and greater weever. Gordon also caught a solitary black goby.

The electric blue markings of this greater weever were particularly vivid under the intense light of my headtorch.

Before we left, a couple of huge stingray arrived and cruised around the bottom, hunting for prey. It was a cool sight at the end a fairly long day's fishing, so we called it a night and headed back to our apartment. 

The next day we decided to head all the way up to Sardina on the northwest coast of the island, to a spot I visited several times the last time I visited Gran Canaria and caught a good variety of species there. On the way, we stopped at a supermarket and bought some raw prawns, squid and bread to use as bait and also a few extra loaves to make up a bucket of groundbait. Arriving in the town and walking down to its small pier, we were soon spooning in our groundbait and had attracted a few fish. Freelining small pieces of bait down through the feeding fish, we soon caught a few bogue.

Fairly large as far as bogue go.

A few derbio also arrived, along with quite a lot of another species that I didn’t quite recognise. I spent a fair bit of time trying to catch one of those and briefly hooked a few, but after a few seconds they would come off. Occasionally, when my bait got closer to the bottom, I’d catch a Canary damselfish, ornate wrasse or a Madeira rockfish. Then I caught a small blenny from the rocky sea floor, that took the tip of a small squid tentacle. Unsure of its identity, I began to carefully examine it.

Initially I thought this could be either a ringneck blenny or a mystery blenny.

Checking its neck it certainly had a couple of rings, but I wanted to check the cirri too, so I popped it into my photo tank. 

The fish’s cirri were relatively long and very thin. They were branched too. On a ringneck blenny, they all begin from a common base, so it wasn’t one of those. They didn't look like the cirri of a mystery blenny however, being much too thin. So, what species had I caught?

Doing further research when I got home, I discovered that there was a third similar species found in the Canary Islands, the monkey blenny. Studying photographs of this species, its cirri much better matched those on my specimen, being branched and very thin. So this turned out to be my second new species of the trip, although it is quite possible that I've caught one before on Lanzarote and misidentified it as a ringneck blenny. In future, I'll be carefully examining the cirri of all blennies I catch in that part of the world! I think this is the best way to confidently identify them to species level.

Meanwhile, Gordon had been fishing further out from the pier with slightly larger baits and was rewarded with a nicely bent rod. After going to ground, he managed to get a nice goldblotch grouper free again, and after a decent scrap, I netted it for him. I then returned my focus to catching the odd fish that were appearing every time I tossed in a few spoonfuls of groundbait. After hooking and loosing a few more, I was just about to run out of groundbait, when I eventually got a decent hookset on one and landed my third new species of the trip.

Again, a bit of research was required later on before I was able to positively identify this as a Madeiran sardinella. The black spot behind the gill plate and the grey tail fin with black tips being the key distinguishing features.

Towards the end of the session, Gordon stuck with fishing slightly larger baits a bit further out, whilst I decided to switch to targeting some predatory fish. I started off fishing some small soft plastic lures on cheburashka weights close to the bottom. This surprisingly didn't produce anything, so I switched to a small metal jig, which also didn't tempt any fish. It wasn't until I tried twitching a small sinking pencil lure over a shallow rocky area to the right of the pier, that I caught a few lizardfish. Not long after that, the sun set and we decided to call it a day.

An Atlantic lizardfish. I also caught it's cousin the diamond lizardfish too. They are super aggressive ambush predtors, and few small prey fish escape from all those inward facing teeth!

As we walked up the hill to the car we were treated to stunning vies to the north of Spain's highest peak, Mt Teide, off in the distance on neighbouring Tenerife.

Our last day on Gran Canaria had quickly arrived. We decided to head back to Puerto de Mogan again, so that I could spend a few hours trying to catch a red banded seabream. Sadly, neither of us caught one, but we did add a few more species to our tally whilst trying.

There were a few planehead filefish around.

We also both caught our first common comber of the trip. Gordon also caught a butterfly winged comber as well.

Late in the afternoon we headed back to the venue where some species hunters I know caught glasseye. For a couple of hours before the sun set, we fished from the rocks at the end the venue's breakwater. Gordon chose to cast baits out onto a sandy area and was rewarded with a few lizardfish and dozens of greater weever, which he had lots of fun unhooking! I suggested he change tactics before he got stung, but he decided to persist with what he was doing! All the while, I had been clambering about on the boulders, dropping small baits into the gaps between them into dark areas, hoping a glasseye would be hiding down in one. This produced a lot of Canary damselfish, ornate wrasse and Madeira rockfish. After a while I caught a few cardinalfish, a dusky grouper and then my fourth new species of the trip in the shape of an island grouper.

Another nocturnal species, Cardnalfish also like to hide down in dark areas amongst boulders during the day.

Gordon had already caught one but this was my first dusky grouper of the trip.

I knew these we also a potential catch but I was still over the moon when I caught my first ever island grouper.

After it got dark, we moved to a different area along from the boulders and turning my headtorch on, I spotted some glasseye! About a dozen of them had appeared from their hiding places and were swimming around incredibly slowly, about a foot below the surface in a fairly shallow area. Some of them were pretty big, and I was excited to see them. Sadly, despite trying several different approaches, I really struggled to induce a take, only hooking one very briefly from down behind a rock, but it came off after only a few seconds. I spent an hour or so trying to hook another, but for whatever reason they just weren't in a feeding mood, so I eventually admitted defeat.

Heading back to the town where we were staying, we went out to a local bar to watch some football, enjoy some food and a few beers. Back at the apartment, we packed up our stuff in preparation for our flight to Fuerteventura the following morning. Halfway into our trip, we were more than halfway to reaching our target of forty species. Normally adding species gets harder the more you catch, but there were quite a few species of seabream that we hadn't caught yet, and I was confident we'd get a few of them before the end of the trip as well as a few other species too.

Tight lines, Scott.

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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 Macaronesian 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.