New Year’s Day started pretty horribly with my alarm going of around 9am-ish with a mild hangover Grrr.
Anyway bait was needed so Rob, Steve and I set off to dig Lugworm. After around 2 horrible hours digging in the freezing rain I had about 1.5lb of lug to add to the 2lb of Lugworm I had dug the day before and as a bonus and my Hangover was gone!
After getting the gear ready and picking everybody up it was time for the long drive down to our chosen mark near to the bridging camp at Chesil which is a proven hotspot that has produced many cod for us last year.
After arriving at the beach at around 8pm, paying a fortune for parking (over £6!!) and walking miles along the beach, fishing could finally begin.
The plan was to fish one rod with a large Lugworm bait and the other rod as a tandem live bait rig set up. Rigs used were up and over rigs. One with a Pennell of 4/0 hooks and on the other a size 2 as the bottom hook and an 8/0 as the top hook. The wind was blowing somewhere between 18-20 mph and there was large surf and a big swell.
On my third cast I had a massive pull down and loads of slack line, so I picked up the rod wound down to loads of weight moving down tide, but for some reason the fish managed to fall off the hooks B*****s!
Ok try again! At around 12 o’clock after many little poor cod and pout the Lugworm rod went again, this time a classic cod bite! ‘Bang’ ‘Bang’ the rod went over twice and then loads of slack line. As I caught up to it I could tell it was a decent fish and after a bit of a tussle I dragged it up the beach, a magnificent Cod 10lb 5oz whoop personal best broken!!
It was then the turn of my mate Steve who landed a cod bang on 9lb. This was caught on the tandem rig, on a small poor cod.
At around 3:30am after another typical Cod bite, I connected with another Cod, but this was very different from the other fish. It felt very weighty and began moving down tide at speed. After playing the fish till about 40 yards out, all hell broke loose! The fish ran about 50 yards the kept taking line, it was like fighting a good Smoothhound!
After a long fight just beyond the breakers I eventually beached the fish. My mate ran down and dragged it out the surf exclaiming “Jesus mate it’s massive!!”
The fish slammed my Avon scales down to 19lb 10oz!! Only 6oz off of the magic 20lb mark!! I really wanted to put him back, but there would have been little chance of him recovering and getting through the massive breakers!
We left the beach at 6am as the weather had taken a turn for the worse and fishing became almost impossible. I almost had 30lb extra weight to carry back!! But was I bothered? Not a chance
Thanks for reading
Adam Fadli
