At
the end of November, I flew down to Lanzarote in the Canary Islands with two of my mates,
Nick and Ryan, for a week of species hunting. I've been twice before and
Nick was with me the last time I visited the island, but for Ryan it was
his first real foreign holiday. We were all looking forward to the
trip, and three sets of tackle went with us. Ultralight gear would be
used most of the time and would no doubt account for most of the species
we would catch, but we also took heavy lure gear to use at dawn and
dusk for barracuda and bonito and finally three heavy beachcasters, so
we could fish after dark for stingrays and other shark species.
The
day before we left we checked the weather and to be honest it left us
feeling a little bit deflated. High winds building up over a number of days
with a fair bit of rain also forecast and couple of days of thunderstorms thrown in
to the mix as well. Certainly not the type of weather you expect when you fly down to that part of the world! Anyway, we
were still determined to make the most of the trip even if we may have to temper our expectations. Arriving in the
evening after the sun had set we quickly picked up the hire car from the airport, drove to a
supermarket to get some food and bait, found our apartment, grabbed the
ultralight gear out of our luggage and hit Playa Chica pier for a couple
of hours.
It
was a pleasant, warm evening and turned out to be a fairly busy if short session. We had
raw prawns and squid to use as bait, with the latter proving much the
more effective choice. Fishing the bottom few feet of the water column, we caught a few bogue,
common two banded seabream, white seabream, blue jack mackerel, axillary
seabream, a Madeira rockfish and one of my favourite nocturnal mini
species, cardinalfish.
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| The cardinalfish. These little red rubies come out to feed after dark.; |
Catching
seven different species was a good start to our species hunting. With
over a hundred species possible, I’d set us a fairly ambitious group
target of fifty species for the week, but given the weather that was
coming our way we all agreed to forget that and just enjoy whatever
fishing we managed to do as the conditions might restrict our opportunities during our stay. Back at the apartment we went straight to bed as we had an
early start planned the following morning. We wanted to head down to
the back of Puerto del Carmen harbour for a few hours, targeting
primarily barracuda.
Down
on the rocks before sunrise, we thrashed the deep water in front of us with various plugs,
soft plastics and metal jigs. I think it's more a case of being in the right
place at the right time than anything else, and sadly we had no luck in that respect. We
decided to put the lure rods away once the sun had been up for a while
and headed along to the rocks at the mouth of the harbour armed with our
ultralight gear and some bait.
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| Not an entirely unproductive morning on the heavy lure rods, various new lures were tested and also got a thorough wash. |
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After
scrambling down the rocks from the clifftop path, we got into some fish
straight away. Nick fished in a deep gully fairly close in.
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| Ryan and I
cast as far as we could out into the entrance of the harbour. |
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| None
of us were shocked when we all caught our first ornate wrasse of the
trip. Unsurprisingly, they made up the bulk of our catches over the
remainder of the week. |
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| We added a few more species to our tally in the shape of a common pandora… |
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| …a ringneck blenny… |
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| …and a couch’s seabream. |
We
also caught a black goby, some Guinean puffer and a blacktail comber
before we decided it was getting too hot and the action slowed right
down, the fish obviously agreeing with our assessment of the rising temperature. A bit sweaty we headed back to
the apartment for some lunch and a siesta.
At
about 17:00 we put our beachcasters in the car and headed south to
check out a couple of stingray marks. The wind had really started to
blow and as a result the first mark, a long beach, was being battered by
a large swell, making fishing virtually impossible. The second mark was
slightly better as it offered some protection from the wind, but there was still a
bit of swell running so it was far from ideal. We gave it a go anyway and three up and over rigs baited with sardine were cast out onto a sandy area beyond the rocks, but
after a couple of hours the conditions deteriorated further and when it
started raining we all got a bit of a soaking and decided pack up. Even if we hooked a fish it would have been a nightmare trying to land it. At least we had seen
what the mark was like before the sun had set and if conditions improved we could return later
in the week to that part of the island.
By
the time we got back to Puerto del Carmen the wind had really picked
up, and it rained heavily most of the rest of the evening, so we chilled out in the apartment and had
a few beers with the intention of making another early start the next
day. When our alarm clocks went off, it was raining heavily again, so we
had a couple more hours in bed and waited for it to stop before heading
down to Playa Chica pier for another session there. When we got down
there it was absolutely mobbed with divers though, more divers than I’ve
ever seen there in fact, so we headed west to fish from some rocks near
the mouth of Puerto Calero Marina instead. It’s a spot that usually
throws up a good variety of species, but all we caught were dozens of ornate
wrasse, some puffer and a few Madeira goby. The Madeira goby did add
another species to our group tally. The tally that, as the three of us had discussed, I definitely wasn't
keeping a track of.
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| Living on the wrong island. |
In
the afternoon, we decided to try a new spot further up the eastern side of the
island to hopefully stay out of the wind. A small stone pier in Punta
Mujeres was chosen, and it proved to be a very good spot, comfortable to
fish from, providing lots of ultralight sport and adding several
species to our haul.
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| There were lots of puffer fish in the area. Mainly Guinean puffer… |
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| …but
also the odd Macaronesian sharpnose puffer too. They're more colourful
with various shades of blue spots on them and are a little nicer to look
at, but still a super aggressive, bait stripping pest. |
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| One fairly small shallower area off to the right of the pier held quite a lot of annular seabream. |
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| Nick and I both caught a single planehead filefish each. |
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| Ryan also caught a wide eyed flounder. |
We
fished there until we ran out of bait, adding an Atlantic lizardfish,
some Canary damsel, an Azores damsel and a couple of emerald wrasse to
the species we’d already caught. We also watched several large stingray
swim past the base of the pier and head out off into deeper water. So we had
also stumbled upon another potential mark to fish for them if the
conditions were right. On our way back to Puerto del Carmen we also
checked out Playa de la Garita, a
black sand beach not too far from Punta Mujeres, that we figured might
also be a reasonably comfortable place to fish for stingray after dark.
It had been a productive day and our trip tally, which we’d all
completely forgotten about because we were all just focusing on having
fun, was now a respectable twenty three.
After
dinner, we discussed our options for the next few days after checking the weather forecast again. The following day it was due to improve a bit,
with the wind dropping off slightly, so we decided to book seats on the
first ferry to take us over to La Graciosa in the morning. There we
planned to spend the day fishing into deep water with our heavy lure
rods to see if we could catch some bigger fish.
Up
early the next day, we drove up to Órzola on the north coast and took
the thirty minute ferry over to La Graciosa. It's a very small island
and has no proper roads, so 4x4 jeeps are the only means of transport
available. Speaking to the drivers of these off road taxis, they warned
us against fishing from the two marks I told them we were interested in
going to, saying that the swell was too big on them both for us to fish
safely, instead they helpfully suggested an alternative which we then
drove to. It was a bumpy ride in the back of the old Land Rover, but
after about twenty minutes we were dropped off and given directions to
the mark, which required a short walk north along the rocky
shoreline. Arriving at the small peninsula, it didn’t look anything
special or particularly deep, but we got our gear set up and started
fishing with various lures. The weather forecast had predicted a dry
day, but the grey clouds overhead had other ideas, and we got soaked to
the skin three times. Each time the rain stopped, it gave us the chance
to dry off a bit before it started again, drenching us once more. To make
matters worse, none of us had any interest in any lure from any fish that may have
been around.
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| More
jigs, plugs and soft plastics being cleaned until absolutely spotless.
Shirt, shorts and trainers also got given a good wash too. Repeatedly. |
Eventually
the rain stopped and stayed off, and having tried various different
types of lures with no success, I switched over to ultralight tackle and
kicked a few whelks off the rocks to use as bait. This rather
predictably produced endless ornate wrasse and puffer. Occasionally, a
different species did manage to reach the bait first, breaking up the
monotony.
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| I
caught our first diamond lizardfish of the trip. They seem to prefer
living in rocky habitat, unlike their cousin, the Atlantic lizardfish,
which prefers clean sand. |
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| I also caught a solitary common comber from the rocky bottom in front of us. |
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| Switching
to a split shot rig and dropping my whelk bait into rockpools that
appeared as the tide dropped, produced some rockpool blenny. |
Shortly
before we had to leave, I also got broken off by what I suspect was a
grey triggerfish. We saw one following an ornate wrasse up as I wound
that in and on my next drop I hooked something that powered off when I
set the hook. Heading underneath a ledge, I had no choice but to apply
some pressure to try and bully it away from the snag. As soon as I did though, my rig failed at the
loop knot that I had used to create my hooklength. Landing a grey triggerfish
would have been a new species for me, so I was pretty gutted, but being
busted up by larger fish is always a risk when you fish with ultralight
tackle.
To
their credit, despite not getting any interest in their lures all day,
Nick and Ryan both persisted with the heavy lure gear until it was time
to head back to the dirt track road to get picked up to be taken back to
Caleta del Sebo harbour. Another short bumpy ride later we arrived
back at the port. As we had just under an hour or so to
kill before our ferry left, we fished with our ultralight tackle from boulders at the back of
the harbour breakwater, where we all caught some ornate wrasse and
Guinean puffer. It had been a bit of a disappointing day trip really but
at least none of us blanked on La Graciosa and the rain had stayed off
too, so by the time we caught the ferry back to Lanzarote we were
all fairly dry.
Arriving back in Puerto del Carmen we got freshened up and headed out that evening for a meal and a “few” drinks.
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Things started a little messy when Ryan returned from the bar with these cocktails.
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The
meal was great and we had a great laugh visiting a few pubs before
returning to the apartment where we carried on drinking for a few hours. As we didn’t go
to bed until very late, there would be no early start the next day. This marked the midway point of the trip and whilst the weather hadn’t been
great, we’d certainly tried to make the most of things and had caught
twenty six species in the process. Not bad really, all things
considered.
Tight lines, Scott.
Click here for part 2.
