Boulder Bashing

Five factors for catching wrasse from snaggy ground

AUTUMN CAN BE ONE OF MY favourite times to fish, provided the weather plays ball. If you can dodge the storms and get to the marks, you can bag some specimen-sized fish.

My main summer wrasse haunts have been rocky gullies, rock faces and the kelp forests that festoon the south-east coast of Scotland. However, after chatting with Danny Parkins about wrasse fishing in the boulder fields around Devon and Cornwall, I started to look for such places on my own patch.

There are lots of boulder-filled bays local to me and, as I began to explore, I realised that I have only just discovered the potential that this habitat holds.

The most productive are areas where boulders are exposed at low tide. These warm in the sun and when the tide floods the wrasse follow the tide to hunt around the flooded boulders for food.

I was astounded at how close and how shallow the fish were coming in with the tide – happily hunting in water no more than waist-deep and just a few feet from the shore.

There are five crucial factors for successfully fishing with LRF gear in this extremely snaggy environment.

1 WEED BEDS AND UNDERWATER PATHWAYS

As the boulders gave way to broken ground, I could see small weed-filled gullies leading into the boulder field. These small gullies are crucial to targeting the incoming wrasse. Wrasse follow the tide in, but do not randomly swim into the boulder fields. Instead they follow the gullies and broken ground leading into the area. They use the same gullies to return to deeper water.