Trip #104 – Cogden Calamity

Friday night I was quite excited to be heading out, I’d made a load of new rigs, had a pretty good selection of bait and aimed to fish another new venue. This time it was Cogden beach. Personally I would class the beach as a transitional beach. It’s not as shallow as the Hive (Burton Bradstock), but at the same time it’s not as deep as West Bexington which is only up the coast a few miles east.

Arriving a few hours before high tide I was relieved to find the South West coast path providing a flat, solid walking surface. This made a nice change from what can often be a painful trudge along the gravel that is Chesil beach. Walking down the path towards the beach I had a few conversations with passing anglers. One said he had been there all day and managed 8 mackerel. The other said they had fished the tide over low and most of the way up and not even had a bite. He also told me “There are a lot of people down there, someone caught a Hound Wednesday now everyone’s here…” That just made my walk one heck of a lot longer. Still at least it was on grass not gravel. Heading left through the fields I walked and walked until I found a natural break in foliage that allowed access to the beach. After 20 minutes of walking I found an opening and made my way down to the beach, a quick Google showed that I was half way to West Bexington! No wonder I was shattered.

The hot weather on the days previous meant that I was in search of a few Plaice and Sole. But I’d also switch it up every few casts with the occasional big bait out there for a stray lump. Baiting one loop rig with ragworm and another with black lug I pinged them out seaward. After 10 minutes I saw my left rod starting to slowly nod away – “Here we go!”. I struck and could feel a lot of weight, in the back of my mind all I could think was “Bloody dogfish”. However on reeling in I was surprised to see no fish and enormous clumps of weed attached to every hook, connector and the lead. The weed was thick, to describe it I would say imagine casting into freshly mown long grass. It was stringy and everywhere. I swapped rigs and cast back out. Swapping my other rig for a pulley Pennell dropper with a few hermit crab, and I fired that out too.

After rebaiting my other rigs and attaching them to the tripod, I settled down with a cuppa, and began to watch my rods start to nod away again. To cut 4 hours of this repetitive game very short, if I didn’t wind in weed I wound in bare hooks. Apart from the penultimate retrieve where I wound in 2 hookless snoods. The final cast saved me from the blank though, winding in a spider crab latched on to my double sandeel. To be honest this was by far my best cast of the evening I did wonder if my fortunes may have been slightly different had I achieved this distance all night. I would like to say it went out to around 100+yards and using a softer rod seemed to assist me in finding more distance, so will remember this for future sessions.

Terrible photo but this thing was speedy!

This crab was laden with eggs, and once ashore made a quick getaway towards the waterline. I’ll still be classing this trip as a blank, crabs, especially spiders don’t count! I wonder if the guys fishing next to me caught some fish, as occasionally I would see a camera flash go off. But maybe they were trying to emulate a 90’s disco beach rave? Either way, it was hard, hard going. This seems to be a recurring theme as far as Chesil is concerned. I may lay off the out and out beach fishing for a few weeks and target more specific species, particularly mullet and micro species, until I hear of more definite catch reports. At the moment fishing along the south coast seems so utterly hit and miss for a lot of beach species, that some time off may be required just to find some more enthusiasm for it.

I say that, I’ll change my mind in a day or 2 and be back out there before you know it!

Until then…