On our penultimate day on Malta, we visited its capital, Valletta. Parking in the Valletta Ditch Car Park, before walking up into the ancient city, we headed to a rock mark on its northern shore. The fishing there was reasonably good, but we didn’t catch anything new. The bottom was rocky and painted comber were yet again present in large numbers, aggressively hitting our worm baits. I did manage my second Mediterranean rainbow wrasse of the trip, a small male.
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| Mediterranean rainbow wrasse proved to be fairly few and far between at the spots we fished. |
After loosing several rigs to the rocky sea floor, and getting fed up tying new ones up, we tried fishing small metals for a while, but had no luck with those. It was the hottest day of the trip, so we headed back to the car, put our gear away, and walked up into Valletta. Its narrow side streets provided some respite from the beating sun, and a cold drink in The Pub was followed by a stroll up to the Upper Barrakka, just in time to witness one of the cannons there being fired.
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One of the many, very picturesque narrow streets in Valletta!
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A lot of thought obviously went into naming this traditional British drinking establishment. In 1999, the late great actor Oliver Reed had his last ever drink here whilst having a drinking competition with a group of Royal Navy sailors. He had a heart attack and died aged 61.
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Boom! Despite knowing the cannon is fired at 16:00, and the gunner shouting loudly that he was about to fire it, several spectators almost ruined their underwear.
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Leaving Valletta, we stopped at a tackle shop and replenished our supply of live worms before driving back to St Julian's, where we fished from the end of Spinola Pier. Dropping our rigs straight down the end, Gordon caught his first blue runner and I caught a small dusky grouper. Casting further out, we caught lots of painted comber and a few seabream species. I was hoping to catch a black scorpionfish once it went dark, but sadly didn’t manage to get one. Switching to freelining small pieces of worm, saw us both catching a few cardinalfish, saddled seabream and our first bogue of the trip, before we called it a night.
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| Spinola Bay from the end of Spinola Pier. |
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| Dusky grouper are an awesome ambush predator! |
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| Bogue are awesome food source for a variety of predators! |
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| On the way back to the car, we passed a statue of a fisherman sorting his catch and a cat hoping to be fed. |
Up early on our final day, we drove north to take the ferry over to Gozo. On the way, we stopped at the western end of the beach by Għadira Bay, where we quickly discovered that fishing was not permitted. Fishing from the rocks at the end of the beach, I reasoned, was not fishing from the beach, and a few casts from them produced a solitary striped seabream.
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No fishing on the beach. Where does the beach end though?
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| Where the rocks begin surely?! |
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| Our first striped seabream of the trip! Well worth being a little bit naughty. |
Once on the ferry and up on its open deck, we quickly realised that we really should have checked the forecast before deciding to visit Gozo, as it was very windy and there was a bit of a swell running. This was blowing from the north and meant that some of the marks I had planned to take us to might not be fishable, but we decided to visit them anyway. First we headed north to a small pier located between Qbajjar and Marsalforn, where we found waves coming up over the end of it. On top of the pier’s wall there were some religious slogans. One sounded strangely familiar.
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| Sounds a bit like the slogan of a very popular energy drink? |
Luckily, we managed to find a spot close by that we could fish from, and dropping small worm sections down at close range we caught a few wrasse and seabream species that we’d already had earlier in the trip. Soldiering on, I eventually added a black seabream to our tally.
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| The first and only black seabream of the trip |
Next we headed to Dwejra Bay over on the west coast of Gozo. Driving down the winding road that leads to it, it was immediately obvious that we wouldn't be doing any fishing, but we parked the car and walked down to take in the scenery.
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| Fungus Rock sits in the middle of Dwejra Bay. I wanted to fish from the rock on the right had side of the bay, but the waves coming over it meant that was out of the question. |
Heading back to the car, we discussed whether there were any freshwater venues on Gozo. Gordon did some Googling, and it turned out there was a small pond not too far from where we were. The website he found also mentioned that the pond was home to the endemic painted frog as well as the introduced Eastern mosquitofish! Having caught these tiny, aggressive fish whilst in Florida earlier this year, I was sure they would be an easy target. We were sitting on twenty nine species, so catching one would see us achieve our goal leaving the remainder of the day to perhaps add a few more.
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| San Raflu Lake. The only naturally occurring body of freshwater on Gozo. |
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| Using a tanago hook baited with a tiny fleck of worm, I very quickly caught the smallest fish of the trip. The Eastern mosquitofish is a super aggressive little swine. |
Mission accomplished, we headed down to our next spot, Xlendi Bay. We grabbed lunch, then found a spot to fish. The first area didn’t produce any interest, so we moved along the rocks to a second. This proved to be a good decision. After spending an hour or so catching a few wrasse and painted comber close in, I felt like I needed a boost and popped to a nearby café, to get myself a can of Jesus blood. Sorry, an energy drink.
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| The town of Xlendi sits at the end of a gorge. |
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| Did it offer eternal life? No. All the caffeine and sugar gave me a much needed boost though! |
When I returned, Gordon had began casting further out, locating a large patch of sand. Something we’d not enjoyed a lot of success fishing over at any point during the trip, but we were both getting bites straight away, and I was sure lesser weever were responsible for some of them. We didn't end up catching any weever species, but the sandy area soon began producing some of the other species you’d expect to catch over one. I caught a few Atlantic lizardfish and a nice common pandora, we both caught a few striped seabream and Gordon caught a lovely plain red mullet.
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| Burying themselves in the sand, the Atlantic lizardfish darts out to attack its prey. |
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| Prey that stand little chance of escaping from its cavernous, tooth filled mouth! |
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| The common pandora is a very pretty fish with its pink colouration and blue markings. This would be our tenth and final seabream species of the trip. |
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| A lovely plain red mullet for Gordon. The first time he'd caught a member of the goatfish family. |
Early in the evening, we decided to head back to the ferry port. We had a reasonable amount of worms left, so before we boarded the ferry, we used them up fishing in the harbour. Dropping whole worms down into the harbour’s deep water, we were hoping that something bigger would eat them, but this approach only produced a few painted comber and a few seabream species. As light faded, we were treated to a beautiful sunset and once it was dark we both caught a black scorpionfish each. A nice final species to add to our tally, taking it to thirty-four, a very good achievement I felt.
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Whole worms didn’t produce bigger fish sadly!
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In the zone! Gordon's relaxed stance gives no indication of the level of concentration being employed. Being an accomplished shore match angler, who has also competed for Scotland in several international boat fishing competitions, he can hit bites and hook the culprits better than most!
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We were treated to a cracking sunset.
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I was over the moon to catch a small black scorpionfish, shortly after Gordon caught one. Scorpionfish are so cool!
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Once the worms were used up, we caught the ferry back to Malta. Another foreign species hunt had come to an end. Arriving back pretty late, we went out for a nice meal and a few pints of the local lager Cisk, a lovely way to end a great trip.
I really enjoyed my last minute trip to Malta. It was a real shame that Gordon fell ill, I know from experience that there’s nothing worse than being sick when you’re on holiday. At least he recovered reasonably quickly. Whilst the average size of the fish we caught was slightly disappointing, the diversity was not. Below is a summary of what we caught during the trip. Sadly, I didn’t catch anything new.
- Annular Seabream
- Atlantic Lizardfish
- Black Scorpionfish
- Black Seabream
- Blue Runner
- Bogue
- Brown Comber
- Cardinalfish
- Common Pandora
- Common Two Banded Seabream
- Damselfish
- Dusky Grouper
- East Atlantic Peacock Wrasse
- Eastern Mosquitofish
- Five Spotted Wrasse
- Gilthead Seabream
- Goldblotch Grouper
- Golden Grey Mullet
- Incognito Goby
- Mediterranean Rainbow Wrasse
- Ornate Wrasse
- Painted Comber
- Parrotfish
- Rock Goby
- Rusty Blenny
- Saddled Seabream
- Salema
- Striped Seabream
- Thick Lipped Mullet
- White Seabream
- Wide Eyed Flounder
Gordon also caught…
- Bass
- Ocellated Wrasse
- Plain Red Mullet
On reflection, and whilst I did enjoy my time there, I didn’t realise how densely populated Malta was. This made finding places to park a bit of a nightmare at times. As I mentioned at the beginning of my first Malta post, the standard of driving was also pretty shocking. On congested, sometimes very narrow roads, we witnessed some of the most aggressive driving we’ve ever seen, and some of the manoeuvres being undertaken on the major roads were nothing short of recklessly dangerous. Every journey was a real test of my hazard perception skills! Malta is easily the worst place I’ve ever driven a hire car! As a result, I think I preferred the slightly more relaxed feeling on the less populated island of Gozo, and if I were to return to Malta, I’d perhaps base a trip around staying and fishing on that island.
Tight lines, Scott.
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