Species hunting road trip: Swanage Pier.

On day four of my road trip I headed along to Swanage Pier to try and catch a Baillon's wrasse and also perhaps, if I got incredibly lucky, a black faced blenny. I got there before the pier opened, had some breakfast, and had a quick walk around. It wasn't a particularly nice day weather wise, but I was hopeful that the sun would arrive later on, along with lure fishing devotee and fellow species geek Adam Kirby, who was driving down to fish with me.

Swanage Pier on an overcast morning.

Things got off to a fairly predictable start. Fishing small pieces of ragworm on Swanage Pier is always going to produce a lot of corkwing wrasse, and by the time the clouds had lifted, and the sun was beaming down, I'd caught dozens of them, as well as the odd tompot blenny. Eventually I caught what I came for, a Baillon’s wrasse. 

Corkwing wrasse are the most common species under Swanage Pier. In my experience, anyway!

Tompot blenny are also present in good numbers. I find they seem to feed for short spells. You'll catch a few in quick succession, then you won't catch them for a while.

Not so common but still usually present are the pretty Baillon’s wrasse. This one was my first of 2023!

Straight away, I changed my rig slightly to see if I could get extremely lucky and catch a black faced blenny. Taking off my size #10 hook, I tied on a tanago hook and baited it with the smallest pinkie I could find in my tub. This produced bites immediately, but the culprits were tiny black bream, and lots of them! Sporadically I'd catch a rock goby too or a small corkwing wrasse!

There was clearly a large shoal of voracious juvenile black seabream under the pier. 

One of the rock goby I caught. This one with a prominent "custard" tip to its first dorsal fin.

Early in the afternoon Adam arrived, and after we had a quick catch up chat he set about catching a Baillon’s wrasse of his own. After trying a variety of artificial baits and lures, and catching a lot of other fish, he was over the moon when he eventually caught one on an Aquawave Ami, a tiny stretchy soft plastic lure that resembles a shrimp. 

Adam’s lure caught Baillon’s wrasse was taken on an Aquawave Ami fished on a simple split shot rig.

We carried on fishing away and talked about meeting up again later in the week further along the coast in Cornwall. When the pier closed at 17:00 we went for a walk around to the point at the end of the bay. As we went, I scanned the submerged rocks around a few small stone piers for small black and bright yellow fish, but didn't see any of them. Adam spent some time fishing creature lures on a Texas rig over the shallow rocky ground and caught a few ballan wrasse. I messed about in some rockpools, still hoping to locate a black faced blenny, but all I tempted with my pinkie on a tanago hook were some tiny corkwing wrasse and common blenny. Shortly after that, we decided to call time on another great day's fishing in Swanage. I always enjoy meeting up with Adam, fishing with him and talking about fishing. I was looking forward to meeting up with him again soon and told him I'd let him know what my plans were once I got to Cornwall and had formulated them so that he could hopefully meet up with me again!

Tight lines, Scott.

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