Today the EM1B team of three headed due South towards the well known fishing mecca known as West Bexington, which is at the west end of the famous 17 mile stretch of Chesil Beach.
Times were looking good, everything was packed and I was away on time towards collecting Neil at 8am. A quick fuel stop and McDonalds double and sausage & egg McMuffin before arriving in West Bay to collect the bait.
A small snag, the shop didn’t have any! It was due by 10am and it was 10.45am when we arrived. We decided to wait, as the nearest place was Wyke Regis some 35 minutes away. The delivery finally arrived just after 11am, and we got our ragworm and squid.
Off we went to West Bexington, now the car park is on the beach, and directly infront of the car park were lots of people fishing, in hindsight this was probably a good idea as the walk to and from our spot in deep shingle/gravel was bloody exhausting!
We found our spot and set up camp, it was bloody windy, but it wasn’t raining!
Dave Thurlow setting up his sea fishing tackle.
Neil was quick of the mark to get his rods in the water
Where as I was taking it slowly, here I am thinking I’ve got to go all the way back to the bloody car across this beach and its going to take 10 minutes!!
Well Dave was the first to catch, with the first mackerel of the day, we had great hopes at this point.
Here is it in all its fishy glory, this is of course after it was humanely twatted with a lead pipe.
Now this got everyone thinking it was going to be a prolific day’s fishing, again hindsight is such a wonderful thing!
Now Neil managed to catch another two mackerel shortly after Dave, things were looking up! Little did we know it was going to be another 12 hours nearly before we got another bite!
The weather started to get a little worse at this point, no rain, but it was windy and getting a little bit chillier, but we carried on regardless! In the distance below you can see Portland/Weymouth and the sheer size of Chesil Beach!
We had set up a makeshift windbreak using a large lump of plywood found. Here we were to make sausage sandwiches, soup, beans and numerous cups of nice hot tea!
So we ploughed on, the waves at points were huge and the spray off them often reached where we sat! The picture below does not capture the sheer size of some of the waves. It must be said that te weather had stirred up lots of sea grass, which seemed to glue itself to the fishing line and pull the rod making it look like a fish was nibbling, it was bloody frustrating!
Neil managing a huge tangle in his new reel, one of many we had to deal with during the night.
One large wave got the better of Dave, whose trousers got soaked at this point!
So we fished on towards the end of the evening…..
We had a lovely set of sausage sandwiches which took quite a long time on the gas stove, and I put way too much oil in the frying pan, but they eventually cooked and we were all thankful of something to eat and it was hot!
Dave decided to call it a night at midnight, again in hindsight he made a good decision! So he packed up and headed back to Bath, where he no doubt had a lovely night’s sleep in a warm bed, and not the 2 hours I had in a tent which was damp, waking up to rain!
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