Finger freezing finesse fishing fun.

I popped down to St Abbs Harbour earlier this week to target two species, coalfish and flounder. The sun was making a valiant effort to poke through the clouds, but an icy easterly wind made the session a pretty cold one. The tide was out when I arrived, so I fished into the channel at the mouth of the harbour to begin with.

The inner harbour was almost empty.

I had my trusted HTO Rock Rover in the car but decided to go with a bit of finesse, opting to hopefully give a setup I bought for targeting horse mackerel a bit of action. I'm not really a tackle tart but my Major Craft Crostage Light Game 6ft9 0.6-10g Aji rod paired with my Daiwa Legalis LT 2000 loaded up with 2lb fluorocarbon is a very nice combo for fishing on the drop with tiny metals and jighead mounted soft plastics.  I decided to fish the latter and looking through my small box an old favourite that I've not used for a while caught my eye, Marykyu Power Isome in pink. Rigging it up on an 0.9g Ecogear Shirasu Fine jighead, I flicked it out and let it sink slowly towards the bottom. It didn't get all the way down when suddenly my line tightened up. A fish had fallen for my blueberry flavoured trap. It put a good bend in my ultra light rod, was taking some line and was obviously a reasonable size, so I didn't bully the fish too much for fear of being broken off. When a coalfish eventually came to the surface, I had to hand line it up the harbour wall as I didn't have a net with me. I'll never learn!

Great fun on my ultralight setup.

I carried on fishing patiently, repeatedly letting my piece of isome fall down then twitching it back up through the water column. After a while I caught a second coalfish about the same size, so there were obviously a few of them around. My hands had gone pretty numb by that point though, so I decided to go target flounder in a more sheltered area. The water was pretty clear and after a while I hadn't seen any flounders following my isome as I slowly worked it across the bottom. My hands didn't seem to want to thaw out, so I called it a day and headed home, happy to have edged another species closer to my 2023 target of two hundred!

Tight lines, Scott.