Chesil overnighter

July 12th-13th

Fired up by reports of dawn bass on Chesil on Henry Gilbey’s blog Chris and I arrived at the Abbotsbury car park fully charged with bassy thoughts. An azure blue calm day heightened our anticipation as we trudged along behind the shingle bank towards the old concrete defence works known as the Dragon’s Teeth mark. (Reminder to self: pack light next time and take less leads). True to form I managed to quickly get out a fully baited rig while we set up camp (good to get a bait in the water) while Chris took a slightly more leisurely approach to getting himself ready for the day and night ahead. Soon enough Chris whacked out a string of feathers with a Dexter wedge accompanied by “I’ll just get the account opened with a few mackerel”. Little were we to know that it wouldn’t be until the next morning that we were to get anything of note and that would only be a half a dozen or so mackerel.

With spring tide around 7pm we were not too concerned or surprised with the lack of day time action to our various feathers, lures and baits large and small. Come evening time nothing much was happening either with the sea seemingly devoid of life. A wandering lure fisherman confirmed that despite his mate’s recent Friday evening bass that things had indeed been slow locally. I even resorted to the fly rod for a while and whilst I was happy with my casting not a tug was had. I really want to catch a mackerel on the fly. As Chris said it would probably be like being attached to a mini turbo charged tuna- another time perhaps.

Darkness brought a little more action with me retrieving a poor cod which had its guts ripped out by the omnipresent crabs and Chris getting a strong bite which didn’t materialise in to anything. To top things off the spider crabs were regularly snipping through our hook lengths. The plan was to get a couple of hour’s darkness fishing in before rising at dawn to latch on to the bass which were just bound to be around! And so to bed. In one of those tiny flip up tents. Turned out to be ok really- nice and easy up on the beach and just about big enough.

Well we were up by 6.30 which meant we missed dawn by at least two hours. Still nowt about. I valiantly kept on whacking out the feathers and was at least pretty chuffed with my pseudo pendulum casting. Eventually I managed to get around 8 sizeable mackerel all at maximum range. We even chopped one up to have some impromptu sashimi in true Hugh Furry-Windowsill style. Absolutely gorgeous with a bit of wasabi and soy. The rest tasted just beautiful with lemon and oil cooked on the bbq in foil.

I do love spending time at Chesil. I’m not quite sure I can explain why, and I’m not even certain that it’s a good thing to dissect the way one feels about a place. It might be because it reminds of the shingle beaches of Eastbourne, where I grew up. More likely it is the basic elemental nature of such a place. Whatever it is, it is sure to draw us back. Perhaps next time later in the year the night will be longer and we might actually make it up for first light. Who knows, maybe we’ll even be lucky enough to draw a magical silver spiky bass up the beach.