The weather as always was a little unssettled when Kirsty 111 left the port of Douglas and proceeded to catch bait fish at the back of Douglas Head.
Merit 1 with a full crew were already filling up their bait wells with Mackie and left K3 to head south to the Sheddings mark just outside Port st Mary. With our bait caught we arrived at the same mark some twenty minutes later and dropped the anchor.

Order of this part of the fishing session was conger, a fish that we rarely go fishing for but for once both boats were fishing hard for them. This mark can throw up all sorts of fish from Cuckoo Wrasse to Conger, Ling and more recently some very big Tope.

The big mackie baits were deployed and the second rods came out with a veriety of rigs being used from the humble Shrimp rig and normal scratchy rigs to very small hooks on the Port St Mary style rigs.

Micheal struck 1st with a conger which would be about 12lb, while i had to be content with a Pollack and a Cuckoo wrasse. Thinking of replacing my conger bait with freash meat i picked up my rod and went to wind in , the rod bent over and i new that a nice fish was on. a couple of runs later and this big head appeared on the surface and micheal said he would get the net. with no messing about the Conger was brought onboardand was wieghed in at just above the 32lb mark. After taking a couple of pics i went to lift the Conger back over the side to T-bar it the line snapped and we had ourselves a loose fish.

trying to get hold of it was fun and finally we got it back over the side. fishing the produced Pouting ,Dogs and Red gurnards. It was then that Micheals rod bent into action and this Conger did not want to come up and play taking five runs out of Micheal before it finally came close to the boat for me without any messing again to net it and bring it onboard. quickly the fish was wieghed and photos taken before it was safely returned to the depths , the wieght approx on this fish was 32.5lb .With the tide now running very fast the decision to move was a quick one.

Merit 1 decided that they were going to head up towards derbyhaven in search of larger tope having already had one to 50lb at the sheddings mark . We moved out to the inner Cod mark at P S M in search of some tea for sip emmobut to no avail so we also headed for the Derbyhaven mark.

The anchor was once more deployed and the usual suspects turned up in the form of Doggies and Red& Tub Gurnards with a bonus of a double sizable Grey Gurnards for me. Micheal caught our only tope of thge day here and it was not monster but was a very commend able 35lb,er .

The time had come to move into Port Grennaugh in search of black bream ,so up with the anchor once more and off we went .quickly there the anchor down and so was the ground bait to try and coax the little darlings in. micheal got a cuckoo Wrasse while i conjoured up another conger of about 10-12lb followed by several Ling ,having got one of my traces partly snapped off i also got two mackie on the retrive,much to the annouance of Skip.

Fish a set of Shrimp rigs with a whole host of tiny baits on them Micheal then produce the bonus fish of the day which we hopefully will be a new Isle of Man Boat record , a Topknot of 5 7/8ozs . our time for the days fishing was nearly at an end and with the Pub calling it was time to head back to Douglas reflecting on what a great day we had had and with a total of 14 species being caught on Kirsty 111 and how lucky we are to live around such wonderful fishing.

On the day our £ 1 pool was for the most species, we finished on 10 a piece with a total of 12 different fish being caught, they were ; Conger,Pouting,Pollack,Dogfish,Red,Grey and Tub Gurnards,Mackie,Tope,Cuckoo Wrasse,Ling and a Topknot.

HERE ARE SOME PHOTOS OF OUR DAY





CATCHING A FULMER





aDMIN316

my conger deffo bigger than yours jamie ! its bigger and longer!!

You short arse , of course yours looks bigger i still think that they were more equal in wieght .