Species hunting in Sutton Marina.

On day four of my trip I headed south to Plymouth to fish Sutton Marina. I'd arranged to fish with an angler named Rich, who is a regular poster on one of the fishing forums I frequent, for the first time and was looking forward to some company. After meeting up we started of fishing with lures and caught a few rock gobies, goldsinny wrasse and ballan wrasse. I then spotted what I was confident were some two spotted gobies and pointed them out to Rich before catching one just to confirm I was right.

Two spotted goby are fairly common and are easy to spot if you know what to look for. They're the only goby I know that swims around up off the bottom preferring instead to hang around close to the weed on harbour walls.

After a while we started heading around to the top end of the marina where it was a lot deeper. We changed to fishing split shot and Carolina rigs hard on the bottom in an attempt to catch some flounder but didn't have any luck. Instead this produced lots of rock gobies, a couple of sand gobies and a couple of small mackerel that hit our rigs as they fell to the bottom. Carrying on around to the eastern side of the marina we started fishing an area where the lower wall was made up of small rocks inside wire that we thought might hold some tompot blennies in the cracks. At this point in the session I decided to switch to fishing with small pieces of Dynabait ragworm. This saw my catch rate increase with wrasse making up the bulk of the fish and before too long my species tally for the day had entered double figures.

In between lots of corkwing and ballan wrasse I caught this almost purple pouting,...

...my first tompot blenny of the year...

...and a couple of rock cook wrasse.

It was a fun session but time had flown and sadly it was soon time to for Rich to head off. Before we said goodbye we headed back around the marina to Cap'n Jaspers snack shack for something to eat. Species hunting sure can make a man hungry.

The legendary "Jasperizer" double quarter pounder with bacon, cheese, loads of onions, a few pickles and some chilli sauce!

It was good to meet up with Rich and fish Sutton Marina again. It had been a relaxing session and I'd enjoyed my most productive day's species hunting there into the bargain which I was pleasantly surprised by given how late in the year it was. I guess being closed off most of the time means that a lot of the fish inside it are permanent residents and can be caught all year round, especially if you're prepared to fish lures and bait like I did. This venue is well worth a visit if you're in the area whether it be for a spot of species hunting, to fill an empty stomach with a large tasty burger or even both!

Tight lines, Scott.