Welcome To Rockfish Heaven!

Your ultimate guide to locating pollack and wrasse.

- Jim O'Donnell

THE BIGGER WORLD OF ANGLING OFFERS some great knowledge, transferable between disciplines, but there’s one thing that rarely changes wherever you go and whatever you fish for, and that’s watercraft.

Take away knots, rigs and tackle techniques that are, in reality, just different approaches, and what you are left with is a bunch of variable, yet consistent (they will always be there in some degree) natural factors, the understanding of which is the bread and butter of catching fish with any form of regularity or consistency.

I fish from boat and shore, mostly modern lure fishing these days, but I’m just as happy to turn my hand to bait fishing, carp, pike, salmon or any other type of angling, for that matter. What actually catches me fish is the same throughout all the angling disciplines.

The exact definition of watercraft will always be open to interpretation. For me, it is about the natural factors of fishing – the things that are in the lap of the Gods, including wind and tide/current, weather conditions, temperature and light, and, most importantly, fish behaviour and topography. The latter are subjects I like to call the ‘psychology of angling’ – knowing your target species, where to find it, and why it is there.

The truth is, and I often say it to my charter boat customers, “fishing is just farming”. I use farming as an example, hunting would be another, but the crude basics to have any remote chance at being successful at any one of the three – farming, hunting or fishing - are the same. You need to have a superior knowledge of your livestock (quarry) or in our case species, and an intimate knowledge of your land, in our case the open coast, in all its shapes and forms.