Back in the North Sea boom years of the 1990's, Dave Devine and I trailed our Warrior 165 over to Whitby on a fairly regular basis, taking lots of good fish, and building up a reasonable knowledge of the middle range rough gound fishing on offer there. Always this was done over the summer months. Back then, just as now, if offered a window of opportunity for west coast small boat anglers to get a day afloat when the winds on our home patch were keeping local anglers ashore, because the prevailing south westerly wind which is an onshore blow along the Lancashire Coast, comes off the land over on the eastern side. Yes, it was a long way to trail, and it could be hard work, particularly if sea conditions were not quite as good as predicted when you got there. But the alternative of not getting out back home, sometimes for weeks on end, was even worse. Then the lean times came along when the negatives began to out weigh the positives, and we gave up going across. But over the past couple of seasons, things it seems have started to improve. The big question is, where have all these fish suddenly come from, and how with such quality have they managed to creep in un-seen under the radar. Actually, for many people the answer to that question is irrevevant. The fact that Whitby is getting back to business as usual is all most boat anglers really need to know. But it isn't entirely business as usual. Some would argue that since around 2008 it's possibly got even better. Not so much in terms of fish numbers or individual size. What happened in the recent 'lean' period was that charter skippers and anglers were forced to look at other marks and different approaches to the big bucket of pirks and muppets mentality that had previously done so well for so long, the result being that Whitby is no longer just a pirking venue. In fact it has possibly become anything but, and as such now provides good fishing from areas, and at times of the year, that had previously been over looked.
Throughout our earlier visits, I can't think of any occasions when we ventured much more than around 10 miles off. Back then distance from shore was all the rage. But for small boating you have to be realistic and know your limits. So the vast majority of our fishing was probably done in between 120 and 180 feet of water on the drift over rough ground within several miles of base. Then, as now, I wasn't much of a fan of pirks and muppets. I don't really like all that grunt and groan stuff. But if that's what the fish want then that's what you have to give them. It wasn't so bad when a cod concentration was found. It's those long spells spent flogging the lures for little or no reward that killed it for me. So always I would take along some bait and switch to that when my arms got tired. My favourite rig was silver booby beads on short droppers strung out above the weight, which was attached to the lead using a weak link as it can be quite a tackle hungry approach trying to keeps baits at or close to the bottom on the drift. So I was well aware that bait as well as lures was capable of picking up fish. But then as I have said, the fishing went in to freefall, and that was the end of that until recently when we heard about the come back on the jungle telegraph. Ironically, it was the weather over on that side that put us off going across sooner when we had a nice upper middle range tide to go out. But in truth that really didn't matter, because we were still looking at it from old perspective. Whitby today is a very much more versative and accommodating venue than it used to be. Now over the summer months on the middle distance roughs they can catch their cod drifting with shads, usually within a couple of dozen turns of the reel handle after touching bottom. And closer in over the winter months, people are now actually using anchors and uptide fishing, with both approaches finding good numbers of fish.
Boat handling also suffers potentially from the force of the tide here too. With so much run, there are places on the river, particularly as you start heading upstream in any sort of a breeze passing the Tower Buoy which is a cardinal on the New Brighton side, where some quite alarming swells can form due to the sea bed geography and the tide. Having a passing merchant ship leaving the river, which will throw up some wake anywhere, is only going to make things worse. But a more regularly encountered problem, as with the fishing, is holding bottom with the anchor. Here size really does matter. On the day we shot many of these pictures we had the anchor drag. Mersey regulars tend to use much bigger than expected anchors with plenty of heavy chain. You must also rig your anchor to trip by connecting the chain to the bottom and cable tying it along the main arm and through the hole in the top. There are some particularly snaggy spots, one being around the Mersey Tunnel ventilation tower on the Liverpool side from which you can struggle, sometimes to the point of giving up, to get your anchor back. If you don't rig up with a biggie, then expect it to drag. This is indicated by all the fishing lines suddenly going up towards the front of the boat, or by lining up with some convenient land mark and watching to see if you drift past it. Jumping grip can happen anywhere. But I have to say that from memory, we've had by far the most problems of this sort off the Seaforth Rocks. Not that this is the only potential anchoring problem to be aware of. Getting an anchor back in the run, unless you use an Aldernay ring, can also be a struggle, and getting it tangled around the engine leg can be almost akin to suicide. We once somehow managed to foul the prop with rope. I almost fouled my pants as well. In the screaming run, the boat suddenly shot around stern on to the swell and we looked as if we were about to ship some serious amounts of water. I grabbed the knife just in case to cut the rope, but we quickly managed to stabilize the situation. So be very careful when paying out the rope.
Mark No 1 – North of Sandsend: The wind forecast we had was 12 mph south westerly, which for uptiding inshore, on paper at least, sounded perfect. What we couldn't get our heads around while sailing down the river was seeing so many famous charter boats such as Heartbeat, Saxon-Lady and Sarah Michelle tied up at their moorings. If there were fish out there, why were they not out with parties grabbing their share. Was it that the jungle telegraph had perhaps got it wrong. None the less, we plodded on, finally giving the big Suzuki the gun as we exited the entrance and made our way north up past the village of Sandsend to fish the hard ground inside the 50 foot contour. It's over ground such as this that the winter uptiding is done. Perhaps we were a bit early in the season; perhaps there were no fish inshore yet to be had, or perhaps as usual we were worrying about nothing. One thing's for sure, having driven all that way and coughed up the launching money, fish or no fish, we were there for the day. Having a dropping tide also mean't that we were out for the duration as we would not have been able to comfortably re-trailer the boat until at least mid afternoon. All of that said, we could tell immediately that our options were going to be limited to the inshore marks regardless of what we had planned to do. So it's just as well that we were intending to put the anchor down and fish with bait. The wind was actually whipping the tops off the waves almost up to the shore. But as long as it stayed as it was there would not be a problem. However, things were not helped when we pulled up alongside another Warrior with rods over the back and was told that the cod, along with a lot of ling, were still out on the middle reefs, and that all he had caught was one pouting. So you can immagine how we felt when the bites that came immediately when we put the handbrake on also turned out to be pouting. Fortunately, that early disappointment was not to last.
Tactically, uptiding is uptiding regardless of where you do it in the sense that a castable flowing trace loaded with bait pinned out across the tide is the standard approach. That said, with one foot in the past still to some textent, I quite fancied trying a booby bead dropper rig too. So I set up one rod that way which I lobbed out over the back, and a second with a four foot flowing trace. Charlie on the other hand went straight for two flowing traces. But what he'd also done while getting in the family shopping at ASDA the evening before, was pick up a couple of bags of mussels he'd spotted on the fish counter to go with the blacklug, squid and mackerel we had also brought. So in the 'interests of objective science', I left him to do his thing tipping his baits off with the mussel while I did mine. That way, given that there would be enough fish to pick out any patterns from, we could get a better handle on what works best. As I say, the first few fish turned out to be pouting, and nothing it seemed was going to deter them. Then Charlie sneaked in a cod, followed by another, and then a third, all on flowing traces fishing blacklug and squid tipped off with mussel. I didn't have the mussel and nor did I have a cod. But then after another codling to Charlie, his fish supply suddenly dried up and I started to pick up a few. He still finished up with more cod than me. And looking at the final stats, the flowing trace, particularly when there was mussel on the hook, accounted for the greatest number of codling. Then the tide started to ease and things went predictably quiet leaving us sat anticipating even more activity on the flood.
Mark No. 2 Ledge towards Runswick Point: The effect of the new tide was very slow in coming. We could see the early signs of movement by the turbulence going past the outboard leg, but the boat was swinging first one way then the other in the swirling breeze. So bad was it in fact that for a short while we were forced to bring our lines in for fear of having them dragged in to snags. In the end I decided to put the drogue out over the stern. Even that took its time in having an effect. When eventually the run picked up enough to fill the drogue pulling the stern of the boat around, there was still too much breeze to allow us to position properly in the tide. But at least it had stopped the boat from wandering, so we were able to put the lines down again, picking up a few more fish. But for some reason, the flood proved to be much slower than the ebb. So, as a combination of wanting to try a new spot, and getting out of the swirling wind, like a couple of charter boats that we spotted fishing close by, we decided to run in closer in the hope of getting some shelter from the cliffs. But as well as closer in, we also decided to run further north to an area where Dave and I had taken very good numbers of fish in the past close to the point marking the southern edge of Runswick Bay. It wasn't exactly the same spot as by this time we had tucked in very close. But what we did find was that the bottom droped away, or rose up depending on how you approached it, very rapidly at one point from 50 feet to 28 feet. Very interesting. So the anchor went over to put us along the edge of the drop off in the hope that fish might be using the drop off face as a motorway for working their way along the coast.
We did catch there, but not to the level that had been anticipated. Having said that, talking to other people back at the slip, neither had anyone else fishing the flood due to the conditions on the day. On a different day I am confident that this second mark would produce fish, though in all honesty, once you are in this whole general area of hard ground which is usually given away by the presence of pot markers, precise coordinates mean very little. You try a spot and if it doesn't produce you move around until you find another that does. There is plenty of scope out there, and with fish constantly on the move searching the whole area for food, productivity is always going to vary on a day to day basis. You can run further up the coast past Runswick Bay, or even to the south in the direction of Robin Hoods Bay. So long as you are over the harder ground then you are in with a shout at the cod. And though not speaking from personal experience here, I believe that if you do end up over some softer or more mixed ground, providing you are fishing with mackerel or squid, then there are also some nice thornbacks to be caught. But to be honest, our main focus, and probably that of most other people boat fishing inshore was to catch cod. With that in mind, had conditions been a little different in so far as wind strength goes and we could have confidently run off out of the shelter to between 3 and 4 miles, then fishing on the drift would have been a whole lot easier on the day than swinging on the anchor. Shads would then have been the obvious choice. But with some colour in the water, which we had this particular day, maybe drifting with bait on the booby bead rigs may well have proved a better option as it had been for me at least on so many occasions in the past.
Whitby Generally:I think it's worth pointing out that so far as fish species go, Whitby is far from being a one horse town. I know that for some, the words Whitby and cod tend to be synonymous, and in terms of reputation, that certainly is no bad thing. They get a lot of ling there too over the summer and early back and on fish baits out in the deeper water which can be a day saver when the cod aren't playing ball. But this year in particular, quite a few halibut have also been coming into the frame. There has always been the odd one or two put in a show. Usually they are small fish hovering around the double figure mark, though still fish that every one of us would dearly like to catch. This year however, not only have the reported numbers I have picked up on been up, but so too has the size with one fish I heard off going around 50 pounds. Anglerfish are another species anglers pick up at Whitby probably more regularly than at a lot of other venues, usually when they drop a pirk on to the nose of one as this is a species feeds almost exclusively on live fish. Both the halibut and the anglerfish are species I saw on a number of occasions when I did trips aboard the commercial boats a little further up the coast collecting research specimens. We would also see quite a lot of other interesting species which unless you specifically tried for them, you would probably never catch on rod and line. Things like wolf fish, hake, redfish, greater forkbeard, long rough dab and witches, all taken within sight of land. Some charter anglers are even catching porbeagle sharks from the port now. So when we are next fishing further off over the summer months, it might be worth putting a rubby dubby over and a big bait out on wire under a balloon on an extra rod.
WHITBY FACT BOX
Tackle Shops: I didn't actually visit any this time around, but in the past I have done business at Whitby Angling Supplies at 65 Haggersgate, Tel. 01947 603855. There is also Rods & Reels at 67 Church Street in the town.
Launch Site Marina car park. Tel. 01947 602354.
Mark 1: Sandsend 5431169N 0039685W.
Mark 2: Ledge edge towards Runswick Point 5431447N 0040365 W.
Other hard ground marks further off that have produced fish in the past...
- 543773N – 003106W
- 543389N – 003200W
- 543696N - 003142W
Tides: Whitby has its own tide table which you can either buy locally, or view online at www.pol.ac.uk
Safety: The nearest 24 hour Coastguard centre is Humber (Tel. 01262 672317). There is a local Coastguard service which unfortunately is not 24 hours. The RNLI have both an inshore as well as an offshore boat at the port.
Weather: Humber Coastguard Tel. 01262 672317, or online at www.metoffice
Warning: Liverpool is a very busy commercial freight port.
Accommodation: Plenty of B&B locally as it is a major holiday destination.
RATINGS
Location and travel *****
Facilities *****
Tackle Shop ****
Location Safety *****
Fish Quality *****
