Searching high and low.

Last Friday afternoon I resumed my search for a topknot, splitting a fairly long session over two venues. This first I visited was the gantry over the inlet area at Torness Power Station. Armed with some live prawns, I fished over a steeply sloping concrete surface, trying to drop my bait in underneath the weed line where I believe there’s a very slim possibility that my target could be located. It was a very windy day, which made bite detection difficult from my elevated position, with the strong gusts picking up my line and pulling my rod around a bit too. Things were pretty slow to begin with, but after a while the wind dropped off ever so slightly and this coincided with some wrasse beginning to bite. 

Even with its relatively small mouth, this goldsinny wrasse made short work of a prawn. 

After catching a few smaller fish, something much bigger grabbed my bait and did its best to get into the kelp. After a short battle, that tested my fish fighting abilities on ultralight tackle as well as my knot tying, a chunky ballan was brought to the surface and my 5.9m extending net handle was put to very good use. 

A bit of a lump! Would have struggled to land this without my net.

At over 40cm, this was the biggest ballan I’ve caught in a while.

I carried on fishing away until my bait was all used up, catching a few more ballan wrasse in the process. A couple of small coalfish and cod also took my prawn, but no funky flatfish sadly. After collecting a few more prawns, I drove south to St Abbs Harbour for the second half of my session, arriving just as the sun was beginning to get fairly low in the sky. 

St Abbs Harbour/Campervan Park as light just begins to fade. 

Waiting for it to get dark, I headed to the mouth and then worked my way around the inside of the largest section of the harbour. Just outside the entrance, I fished with prawns to begin with, but my supply was being depleted rapidly by large shoals of juvenile pollock and coalfish. To conserve my bait for my target species, I switched over to a soft plastic. 

My bait for the evening. Too good to quickly waste on juvenile pollock and coalfish.

Quite a few of the greedy little fish aggressively attacked my HTO Knight Worm. 

Moving around to fish down the walls inside the largest section of the harbour, I switched back to prawns again. Dropping my rig down and keeping it in close to the vertical surfaces, hoping that it would land near a bug-eyed flatfish, they instead were swallowed whole by a few long spined sea scorpion.

You've got something stuck in your teeth mate.

Once it got dark, I put my headtorch on and began searching down the walls and in the exposed rockpolls outside the harbour. Scanning slowly, hoping to suddenly spot the reflection of a topknot's beady eyes, the strong light from my narrow beam was not returned, so I began speculatively dropping a live prawn into likely looking holding places. After a while, I climbed down onto some rocks and started shining my light around. I spotted some small fish, but wasn't too sure what they were. Luckily I had my tango rod in my backpack and put it to good use catching some of them. They turned out to be fairly large three spined stickleback.

Three spined stickleback are anadromous, meaning they can live in saltwater, returning to freshwater to spawn. 

I then spotted a fifteen spined stickleback, a much trickier target, but I love a little micro species challenge so decided to turn my attention to catching it. Lowering my tanago hook baited with a miniscule piece of raw prawn down, I was expecting a frustrating time trying to catch it. In my experience, they are usually quite fussy eaters and take a bit of patience to get them to bite, but much to my delight on this occasion it quickly ate my offering.

God, I love tango hooks! They make the impossible, possible! This is only my third ever fifteen spined stickleback!

Quite pleased with my unexpected stickleback species interlude, I turned my attention back to hunting for a topknot. Exploring different areas over the next couple of hours, things were very slow, and eventually I'd gone a couple of hours without catching anything at all. When I started taking photographers of the large sea slaters that were crawling about all around the top of the harbour wall where I had ended up, I knew it was probably time to call it a night! 

Creatures of the night. I might be joining them again soon.

So my search for a topknot continues. For the foreseeable future, I think they'll remain my main target species to take my lifetime Scottish tally to Ninety-eight. I think some of the rocky venues around Greenock and Gourock may hold more topknots, so I think I may charge my headtorch up and head through there for after dark sessions once the days get a little shorter. I'll also be trying through there during the daytime as well in the meantime!

Tight lines, Scott.