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Mevagissey Mackeralfest
by keith n » 25 Aug 2014, 19:51
Arrived at Mevagissey just after lunchtime on Friday 15th . I was expecting a poor weeks fishing after reading numerous “crap fishing “ reports and having my Cornish cousin saying the week before that “there are no mackeral in the bay” how wrong I was !
First words from Chris (my cousin) were “the bay is full of mackeral “ Yee Haa
It seems the a couple of days before there was an invasion of whitebait all being hunted by mackeral - they were even catching them in the inner harbour , which has never been seen before .
Was down early evening with both float rods ready for the off , mackeral were coming in thick and fast - on feathers !! ( I hate feathering ) but hard work on the float so I set up a bass rod with a set of feathers and had a go , 2 casts and 2 full strings and I was bored so went to hit the bottle instead.
80% of the fish caught were tiny - 8” or so
Over the next 10 days I tried alsorts . Feathers on a barbel rod ( strange but you get a far better fight with a single fish on the barbel rod than you do with a string of 6 (more than 1 fish is just a dead weight to reel in but even the small ones fight like buggery by themselves)
Best fun was a 10’ coarse match rod with a 10g toby spinner I had fish to over a lb on this and when they hit the lure it just pulled the rod over double . Most times it was a fish per cast with 90% of them going back in as they were too small - but I still finished up with over 40 in the freezer .
Odd thing was that all I saw caught was mackeral , no Pollock , no garfish and certainly no bass .
I did watch a bloke buggering about with some odd looking lures ( thinking that he didn’t have a clue ) until he pulled a squid in over a foot long followed by a cuttle fish , Next year I will have a couple of squid jigs with me - I never knew you could get them there .
On a downer I got fed up with people catching and killing all they could and then either binning them or trying to give them away , I have no objection to people filling boxes IF they are going to use them either as food or bait but why kill them just for the fun of it ? ( I gather that mackeral are very unlikely to survive when cought and returned but at least give them a chance or put them back in the food chain ) I reckon that well over 500 a day were killed at Meva and most of the north coast seemed to be the same ! I’m told that the commercial fishermen feathering for them in the bay were getting about 20p per kilo !!
A fantastic weeks fishing , next year I will be trying to find something lighter than a barbel rod for float fishing , and what a shame that Mack don’t grow to 10lb - no-one would bother with bass then
First words from Chris (my cousin) were “the bay is full of mackeral “ Yee Haa
It seems the a couple of days before there was an invasion of whitebait all being hunted by mackeral - they were even catching them in the inner harbour , which has never been seen before .
Was down early evening with both float rods ready for the off , mackeral were coming in thick and fast - on feathers !! ( I hate feathering ) but hard work on the float so I set up a bass rod with a set of feathers and had a go , 2 casts and 2 full strings and I was bored so went to hit the bottle instead.
80% of the fish caught were tiny - 8” or so
Over the next 10 days I tried alsorts . Feathers on a barbel rod ( strange but you get a far better fight with a single fish on the barbel rod than you do with a string of 6 (more than 1 fish is just a dead weight to reel in but even the small ones fight like buggery by themselves)
Best fun was a 10’ coarse match rod with a 10g toby spinner I had fish to over a lb on this and when they hit the lure it just pulled the rod over double . Most times it was a fish per cast with 90% of them going back in as they were too small - but I still finished up with over 40 in the freezer .
Odd thing was that all I saw caught was mackeral , no Pollock , no garfish and certainly no bass .
I did watch a bloke buggering about with some odd looking lures ( thinking that he didn’t have a clue ) until he pulled a squid in over a foot long followed by a cuttle fish , Next year I will have a couple of squid jigs with me - I never knew you could get them there .
On a downer I got fed up with people catching and killing all they could and then either binning them or trying to give them away , I have no objection to people filling boxes IF they are going to use them either as food or bait but why kill them just for the fun of it ? ( I gather that mackeral are very unlikely to survive when cought and returned but at least give them a chance or put them back in the food chain ) I reckon that well over 500 a day were killed at Meva and most of the north coast seemed to be the same ! I’m told that the commercial fishermen feathering for them in the bay were getting about 20p per kilo !!
A fantastic weeks fishing , next year I will be trying to find something lighter than a barbel rod for float fishing , and what a shame that Mack don’t grow to 10lb - no-one would bother with bass then
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Re: Mevagissey Mackeralfest
by grumpyppops1 » 25 Aug 2014, 20:03
Had the same experience in ullapool 36 years ago.the novelty soon wore off couldn't get past them for anything more interesting.l remember kids in the harbour catching them with metal coke bottle tops ,no hooks.compared to my blankety blank now I know what I would settle for.great blog 
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Re: Mevagissey Mackeralfest
by pros » 25 Aug 2014, 20:10
I was down there in may and you couldn't buy a fish.
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