Tackle for sea fishing, Part 2

Another feature of these points of Cromer coast is that they disturb the tide. If you stop for a couple of seconds and watch the water from the beach path, you will clearly notice the tides change in movement around these points and when looking for fish, even the slightest change in tidal movement is always a good place to start, this is also where you will need a good bite alarm, such as fox bite alarm. The simplest way to describe this is to imagine a beach is like a motorway flat and featureless, and then you come across a service station. Basically the slightest feature like these points, with their differing sea bed and tidal movements, are like service stations for cod travelling up the channel. The only difference is, service stations do not serve crab.

After the slog along the beach, it was starting to get cold. Mind you, if you wear good sea fishing clothing such as diem clothing it is not too bad. J finally picked his mark for the evening session and his fishing partner Rochelle started to set up her sea fishing equipment about 100 yards to the right of J. I find the best time to pick an angler’s brains is while they are rigging up, so a J set up his sea fishing equipment I quizzed him, and there is what I found out regarding guru fishing tackle and fishing techniques. There isn鈥檛 any specific tide when the water in Cromer fishes best, basically it fishes on any tide as long as the tides are not huge springs which make it difficult to hold bottom due to powerful currents. J prefers the out-going tide although he admits he has had great days fishing this area on the flood and incoming tide too. As J set up his guru fishing tackle I couldn’t help notice he was also using match rods from Daiwa. Usually I associate the Cromer beach with heavier, rough-ground rods, but when I asked J why he was using them it all made perfect good sense.

The Daiwa sea fishing rods happily cast from 150 to 200 gram of lead, which is what I use, but the main reason is that their softer tips bend and lean into the tide better. If you use stiffer-tipped rough-ground rods, on this type of broken ground, said J, the tide pull is going to keep bumping the lead out. For a bite alarm he prefers to use a fox bite alarms. His chosen reel to pair with the Daiwa sea rod is a Daiwa Saltist 20H, loaded with 15ib clear Berkley Big Game and a 60lb shockleader because the reel has cranking power and the line is second to none for rough-ground fishing.

On the business end of his fishing tackle, J was wearing diem clothing for sea fishing and using a rig that I have not used before 鈥?a pulley dropper rig. His theory is that in the strong tides of the channel, the rig that offers the best bait presentation by far would be a simple running leger. But, as we all know, you cannot cast a running leger long distance because it is not aerodynamic and, due to this, most of the bait flies off mid-air. So the pulley dropper basically gives him a running leger that can be blasted to the orizon with no worries of damage to his baits. For the snood he uses 30lb clear Amnesia and two 2/0 or 3/0 Sakuma Manta Extra hooks, Pennel rigged.