Species hunting advetures on Sardinia: Part 1.

A trip to Sardinia had been on my to do list for a few years, so when my mate Lee suggested we go, I obviously said I’d love to. Lillian was also keen to come too, so last month we made the long drive down to Lee’s and then very early the next morning, the three of us flew down there from London Gatwick. Lee organised everything and it was nice not to have all the hassle that goes with booking flights, accommodation and a hire car for a change! After landing in Olbia we drove west to Isola Rossa, where we’d be staying for the duration of our holiday. After unpacking our cases, we went for a walk. A strong wind was blowing onshore from the northwest, and the sea was crashing onto the rocks at the back of the town’s large marina, but inside it was nice and sheltered. 

The red rock a few hundred meters offshore that the town is named after.

We decided the inside of the marina’s breakwater would be our first fishing spot, but we were quite hungry so headed back into town for some pizza and beer. 

After our late lunch, we were all feeling pretty tired, so we headed back to the apartment for a much needed nap. When we got up, we headed down to the marina to see what fish we could catch. We decided not to set any kind of fishing targets for the trip. In fact, neither of us had done any pre trip planning, we were happy just to wing it, do some fishing and target whatever species were present. Trying various spots around the marina, it quickly became apparent that we might actually struggle to catch anything! It strangely seemed to be devoid of fish!

Lee fishing away, waiting for bites. 

Eventually I caught a couple of fish. This being the second of two saddled seabream I caught. 

The next day we drove west to Castelsardo, officially one of the most beautiful villages in Italy. From the end of its port’s outer breakwater we got a great view of the ancient fortifications and the colourful buildings on the steep slopes surrounding them. 

The ancient town of Castelsardo.

To begin with, we fished inside the port and were quickly getting lots of little nibbles. Lee was fishing with soft plastics on a jighead whilst I fished small pieces of squid just above the bottom. I had to scale down to a smaller hook to find out what was biting. 

It turned out to be black goby, and they were present in large numbers.

After catching several black goby, and nothing else, we moved along to a gap in the wall of the outer breakwater and fished from the rocks there into the sea. It was quite windy and the resulting swell made fishing tricky. I caught a few juvenile Mediterranean rainbow wrasse further out, whilst Lee pulled out a beautiful East Atlantic peacock wrasse from much closer in amongst the boulders.

Mediterranean rainbow wrasse would turn out to be by far the most prevalent wrasse species of the trip for me. 

Lee’s stunning East Atlantic peacock wrasse. Easily the most colourful example I’ve ever seen. 

After a while we hadn’t caught anything else, so we decided to head back to the car and drove south to the large port city of Alghero. At the first spot we fished in the city’s expansive harbour, there was a large shoal of juvenile annular seabream.

Catching these small annular seabream soon became quite repetitive.

Moving to fish along the outside of the northern breakwater of the port, I spotted a few blenny sitting on some submerged rocks. I had an idea which species they were, but there was an element of doubt in my mind, so I spent ten minutes or so trying to catch one, just to be sure. 

My suspicions were correct, they were rusty blenny. This particular specimen was rather plump!

A bit further along the rocks we found some deeper water and focused our efforts fishing over a cleaner area. Again, I fished small baits just above the bottom whilst Lee fished with lures. There were a few fish around and we were fairly sheltered away from the wind. 

I caught a solitary painted comber,..

…a couple of common two banded seabream,..

… and also my first East Atlantic peacock wrasse of the trip. 

Annular seabream were also around in good numbers. 

Lee wasn’t catching as many fish on soft plastics, so he went off to try his luck at another spot on the inside of the breakwater. When I went over to join him, he told me there were lots of damselfish in a corner next to where he was fishing. I switched to a split shot rig with a very small hook and quickly caught a few of them. 

Although we didn’t have a target, I just couldn’t help myself and added a damselfish to my tally. 

I also caught a few small seabream and wrasse by letting my split shot rig fall all the way to the bottom. Just before we left, I also caught a goby. Swinging it up to my hand, I quickly recognised what it was and realised that I had caught a new species! 

My first ever red-mouthed goby! I had no expectation of catching anything new on Sardinia, so this was a very welcome surprise indeed!

After a while, we walked back to the car, put our tackle in the boot, and went for a stroll around the older walled part of the city. Many medieval features remain, most notably its high sea walls. As well as some sections of the city’s fortified walls, there were several pieces of wooden artillery on display that would have been used to attack the ships of unwanted visitors. 

Quite an impressive catapult and some hefty stone projectiles on display. I’m not sure if this is an original weapon or a reproduction. 

The following day the wind had picked up again, so we drove west to Stintino. Being located on the eastern side of a peninsula we figured it would be fairly sheltered. It was, but when we arrived at the first spot it was raining heavily. When it stopped, and we started fishing, we were quickly approached and politely told we were not allowed to fish in that area. At the next spot the bottom was very snaggy, and the fishing was very slow. Apart from a few juvenile Mediterranean rainbow wrasse, I struggled to catch much else. 

More spots that looked very fishy turned out to be pretty much devoid of any fish. 

With a lot of perseverance, and by moving constantly and trying a lot of different spots, I did manage to add one sharpsnout seabream and a five spotted wrasse to my tally, but it was really, really tough going. 

Only my second ever sharpsnout seabream. 

I pulled this tiny five spotted wrasse out from a deep hole in the rocks.

By this point, it was becoming quite clear that the fishing was going to be very challenging. Most of the areas we visited looked like they should hold plenty of fish, but the lack of any was quite startling. After some seafood for lunch in a small restaurant, we headed back to Isola Rossa. In the evening we fished around the marina again. It was another tough session, but Lee’s persistence with soft plastics was rewarded when he caught the biggest fish of the trip so far.

A cracking black scorpionfish, a nice reward for his efforts. 

The following day, we drove all the way over to the northeast coast. The first two places we visited, we didn’t stay long because it turned out fishing was not allowed. We ended up driving into Olbia where we fished for a couple of hours over an almost featureless silty seabed. We quickly discovered there was a very healthy population of black goby in the area.

All we caught was black goby. The bottom was carpeted with them. I must have caught about fifty of them by the time we gave up trying to catch anything else!

Sardinian goby fest 2025 in full flow.

I did spot a blenny down the side at one point, but it swam off into a crack and refused to come out again. Feeling pretty deflated at this point, we again put our tackle away in the car and spent a few hours wandering around Olbia, Lee treated himself to a pair of hand made loafers, and then we went for some pizza and pasta before driving back to Isola Rossa.

Passing this fountain in Olbia, I was tempted to toss a coin into it and wish for better fishing!

Our first few days on the island had not been kind as far as the weather or the fishing had been concerned. Lee’s East Atlantic peacock wrasse and black scorpionfish, as well as my first red-mouthed goby aside, the fishing had been very disappointing. To make matters worse, much stronger winds were forecast for the coming days, with gusts in excess of 50mph. Before those arrived, we decided to have another evening session in Isola Rossa’s marina.

Tight lines, Scott.

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Species hunting adventures on Malta: Part 1.

A couple of weeks ago, whilst I was in the Edinburgh Angling Centre picking up some bits and pieces, my former workmate Gordon asked me if I had ever been to, and fished on, the islands of Malta. He was thinking about booking a last minute holiday there. I hadn’t been, but told him what I thought he could expect to catch if he decided to go and took some fishing tackle with him. A week or so later, I sent him a message to see if he was going. He told me he had booked up and was going on his own at the end of September. I’ve always fancied visiting Malta, so I thought about it briefly and asked him if he wanted some company! He said yes, that would be great, so I booked my flights, accommodation and a hire car for us to explore Malta in. Easily the most impulsive, last minute foreign holiday I’d ever decided to go on, we flew out from Edinburgh and arrived in Malta early in the afternoon. On the flight down there, as we passed over Sicily, I spotted something off in the distance.

Smoke rising from Mount Etna off in the distance. Other budget flights are available.

After picking up our hire car and dropping off our luggage at our hotels, we were on our way to wet our lines. The standard of driving on display during the short twenty odd minute drive was a real test of my patience and hazard perception to say the least! Thankfully, we made it to the south coast town of Birżebbuġa in one piece and parked the car next to a large rusty statue.

This artwork celebrates the end of The Cold War.

Fishing with small pieces of dehydrated ragworm, we were both quickly catching a few small fish. As we did so, I suggested we set ourselves a target of thirty species for the week. As is usually the case at the beginning of a trip, we got our species hunt off to a good start. Within an hour or so, we’d caught nine between us. I caught damselfish, painted comber, East Atlantic peacock wrasse, common two banded seabream and annular seabream. Gordon caught some five spotted wrasse, parrotfish, Mediterranean rainbow wrasse and a solitary ocellated wrasse. Somehow, neither of us had caught any of the species that the other had!

There were lots of damselfish around. Expert bait strippers!

One of the larger East Atlantic peacock wrasse I caught.

Further out there were a few annular seabream.

After a while, the bites dried up considerably, and we were struggling a bit in the heat too, so we headed around to the side of the Birżebbuġa Waterpolo Club, a few hundred meters away from where we had started our first session, where we were able to fish in the shade. There, we found a large rockpool and set about catching a few mini species from the bottom of it. There were lots of goby on the sandy bottom and a couple of large blenny sitting on rocks. The goby proved very straight forward to catch, but the blenny weren’t so easily tempted by our small pieces of dried worm. 

There were two species present. The majority were incognito goby.

Amongst them, usually hiding, was the odd rock goby.

Next, we switched our focus to fishing in the sea next to the rockpool, where as well as a few more of the species we'd already caught, I managed to add a few five spotted wrasse to my own tally.

The five spotted wrasse, so named due to the five spots on its dorsal fin. These aren't always well-defined. It belongs to the same genus as the corkwing wrasse.

Before we left, we walked around the outside of the waterpolo pool to the end of the beach in Pretty Bay. After taking a short break on a bench, where we enjoyed some fried chicken, chips and some cold drinks, we spent some time fishing over the sand as the sun set. Surprisingly, this wasn’t very productive and only produced a couple of small white seabream. Still, it had been a fairly fruitful start to our species hunting. We were into double figures after only a few hours fishing!

These small white seabream were caught by casting back towards the shoreline, very close to the beach.

On day two, I picked Gordon up from his hotel and we headed west, to fish from the rocks near Zurrieq Valley. The sea inlet there is where all the boats leave from to take their passengers to see the famous Blue Grotto, one of the most popular tourist attractions on the island. Gordon and I stopped briefly at the cliff top view point on our way there and took in this stunning geological feature from above.

Perhaps the most visited tourist spot in Malta.

Once we made our way down, parked the car and clambered down on to our chosen spot on the rocks, the never ending boat traffic, and also multiple groups of divers passing by, made fishing very difficult. We quickly used up the small amount of dried ragworm we had left and switched over to using Gulp! Angleworm, but neither hook bait produced a single fish! Breaking for lunch in a small restaurant, we decided to head south in the afternoon to fish from a small breakwater near Delimara Power Station. Before we paid the bill, we asked the chef for a small portion of raw squid, so we could cut it into little strips to use as bait. Unfortunately, the fishing there also turned out to be very challenging. The bottom was very snaggy, and we lost a fair amount of end tackle. It felt like we spent more time tying up rigs than we spent fishing, but eventually our persistence paid off when I caught a small wide eyed flounder.

I love catching wide eyed flounder. I'd love to catch a bigger one, having only ever caught palm sized specimens.

After losing a few more rigs, we moved to a second spot right next to the power station’s gates where the bottom was much cleaner, but this only produced a few small painted comber and seabream species that we had caught already. It had been a difficult morning’s fishing, and we’d only added one species to our tally. We decided to head to a third venue, the pier on the left hand side of the entrance to Portomaso Marina.

The entrance to Potromaso Marina with the Hilton towering over it.

In terms of numbers this turned out to be a great spot, but the species were fairly limited, and we didn't add any new species to our tally sadly. As well as the occasional damselfish and annular seabream, the odd Mediteranean rainbow wrasse for Gordon, which were proving elusive for me for some reason, all we caught were lots of common two banded seabream and even more painted comber.

The area held lots of these little common two banded seabream.

Painted comber are plentiful around Malta. This colourful, aggressive, toothy predator was by far the most common catch from the pier.

So, day two had very much been a game of two halves, a tough morning during which we had only added one new species to our tally, and an action packed afternoon that had failed to produce anything we hadn't caught already during the trip. Fitting then, that in the evening we went out for a meal, then enjoyed a few drinks whilst we watched some football in a bar down in St Julian's by Spinola Bay. We were still on track to reach our target of thirty species, and with plenty of venues for us to try during the coming days, I was quietly confident that we'd be able to hit it.

Tight lines, Scott.

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Light game fun in Croatia : Split.

Arriving in Split in the evening we were pretty tired so we ate a huge takeaway pizza in the apartment, drank a few beers and had an early night. With the hire car at our disposal for the duration of our stay in Split I got up early and went fishing in the mornings. Split is surrounded by the sea on its northern, western and southern sides so I wasn't sure where to go but with a fairly strong wind coming from the north on the first morning I headed to a couple of small rocky breakwaters on the south coast of the city. I was hoping to find some predatory species feeding but the sea was pretty calm and there was no sign of any activity on the surface. I tried some small hard lures and metals to see if there were any larger fish hunting deeper down but didn't get any interest at all sadly. Switching to soft plastics on a drop shot rig immeadiately had me catching rainbow wrasse, painted combers, a few types of seabream and some greater weever. 

A saddled seabream. They have quite a strong pungent smell to them. 

The light of the morning sun shimmered nicely on this annular seabream's scales.  

A greater weever. These can be tricky to unhook and I'm probably pushing my luck with the thumb grip. My mate Nick was stung by one when we were on Fuertaventura back in February and months later his finger still hasn't recovered fully. 

In the afternoon on our first full day we headed to Vranjic, a small peninsula to the north of Split, to visit an aquarium there. It was pretty cool and as well as a lot of tanks full of fish it also had some pretty awesome artwork on its walls including a rather wonderful John Dory.

I'd love to catch one of those.

Afterwards, before we had lunch, I had a few casts over a sandy area on the north side of Vranjic and caught lots of juvenile gilthead seabream, black gobies, a couple of peacock blennies and also my second new species of the trip.  

There were large shoals of these juvenile gilthead seabream. Cool little fish.

Peacock blennies are pretty funky. There were lots of them in the spot where I fished and they were very aggressive, fighting with each other over my lure.

My first ever brown comber. The smallest of the comber species found in the Eastern Atlantic and Mediterranean Sea.

Later in the afternoon we visited the Fortress of Klis that sits up in the hills above Split and then headed west to Kaštela, a region made up of seven small towns on the coast to the north of Split. We had a look around a museum telling the story of the region whose southern wall backs directly onto a small harbour. Before heading back to Split I had a few casts from the end of the harbour's breakwater and caught a few combers. 

The approach to the Fortress of Klis.

The fortress is long and narrow, perched on a long piece of isolated rock in the middle of a pass that runs up into the mountains and is inaccessible on three sides.

The view towards Split from the Fortress of Klis. 

At one time this museum in Kaštel Lukšić was surrounded by the sea with a moat at the front. Now only one side faces into the harbour.

Painted comber don't put up much of a fight but I don't think I'll ever tire of admiring their colourful markings. 

By comparison brown comber are pretty drab. These were much lighter than the others I'd caught perhaps because they were from a much shallower mark. 

For my second early morning session I headed south again but fished from the large boulders at the back of a big marina. The water was pretty deep and I had high hopes but sadly the fishing was pretty poor on the whole. Just before I headed back for breakfast I did catch a rather large and brilliantly coloured male rainbow wrasse but unfortunately it slipped out of my hand and fell back into the water as I got my camera out to take a photo of it. 

In the afternoon we headed west to spend a couple of hours wandering around the Ivan Meštrović Gallery and its lovely gardens to look at some of the work of the late Croatian sculptor.

This was Lillian's favourite sculpture.

This one was pretty impressive too.

In the evening before heading out for dinner I tried a spot at the eastern end of a long rocky sea defence as light began to fade. Surprisingly the fishing was pretty poor though and I only managed a couple of small common pandora. 

The red edge at the top of the rear edge of the gill plate is a good way to identify common pandora.

For my final morning session I headed to a small rocky outcrop to the east of Vranjic. It was a beautiful calm start to the day and the fishing was very good. I caught lots of smaller fish close in and there were also some nice mullet patrolling the shoreline but as I didn't have any bread with me I chose to ignore them. Casting a piece of Angleworm on a drop shot rig into some deeper water further out and slowly working it back towards me I caught some nice gilthead seabream which put up an awesome fight.

These beautiful fish were fantastic sport on light game tackle. 

In the afternoon we went for a walk around Split's old town. We spent several hours wandering about Diocletian's Palace and climbed up to the top of the bell tower. At noon in the main square actors in Roman costumes put on a bit of a show, re-enacting the changing of the guard. To end a pleasant afternoon we had lunch in Buffet Fife, a very popular restaurant that serves traditional Croatian food. We both had meatballs and mashed potatoes which were superb. 

When in Rome...

You can climb up to the very top of the bell tower.

The view from the top of the bell tower to the west.

Very tasty indeed. Very filling too.

Walking around in the sun was pretty tiring so Lillian had a nap when we returned to our apartment. I jumped in the car and headed back to the same spot I'd fished in the morning armed with a small 2.5g float, some bread and a small bucket I borrowed from our apartment to see if I could catch a mullet. Making up some groundbait I soon had them feeding with smaller ones showing up first. Larger fish soon appeared though from deeper down and bullied the little ones away. A patient approach, constant feeding and changing the size of my hookbait to achieve a nice slow sink rate eventually paid off. Most of the fish were nosing the bread on my hook around but when a couple of fish arrived at the same time one of them swallowed it whole and I quickly struck to set my hook. With no net with me I took my time playing the fish out before climbing down the rubble in front of me to lift it out by hand.

It turned out to be a golden grey mullet. The biggest I've ever caught.

After releasing the fish I headed back and in the evening we headed to the old town again for dinner. The following day we had a long drive to reach our final destination of the holiday so we got up early to leave. On the way north we made two stops so I could stretch my legs. Firstly we visited the lovely small town of Novigrad.

Novigrad was in a beautiful location. I'd love to return and spend more time there. 

While I stretched my legs I spotted large shoals of small fish and decided to find out what they were. They were soon attacking a small piece of Angleworm and turned out to be juvenile ocellated wrasse. I've never seen wrasse shoaled up before. When my split shot rig occasionally managed to reach the bottom I caught some peacock blennies too and a solitary five spotted wrasse.

Male peacock blennies have a large crest on their heads and elongated fins. 

This tiny five spotted wrasse managed to beat all the ocellated wrasse to my little piece of Angleworm. 

Back on the road again we stopped further up the coast in Senj for another break and some lunch. Before getting back in the car to complete the day's driving I had a few casts at the end of the harbour's outer breakwater. After a few wrasse and combers I switched to a smaller hook and added an incognito goby and a damselfish to my trip species tally.

A type of sand goby, the incognito goby has fairly distinctive rows of spots along its body. 

Small hooks are required to catch damselfish. I used a #18 to catch this one.  

The second part of our holiday had come to an end, and we'd enjoyed our time in Split. Whilst the fishing had been hit and miss, I'd caught a new species and enjoyed some great light game action with the gilthead seabream. The last destination on our itinerary was Pula in the Istrian region of the country. We were both looking forward to spending the remainder of our time exploring the area. 

Tight lines, Scott.

 

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