Where the hell do I start with this one? Just when I’d thought my summers couldn’t be any more of a mess along came 2020. If you read my last report and then the last post on this website then you’d know I was selling my boat, and it was at that point that the fun and games began!
Having spent 10 years perfecting the ultimate boat for fishing our waters it was losing my dad that caused me to look for something new, to start afresh with some new memories. The boat I really wanted was in the UK, because of Covid I couldn’t get it. A local boat came up for sale,not really what I was looking for but a decent price and a good enough starting point so I went against my gut instinct and bought it. Having spent a couple of weeks doing little jobs and trying to figure things out (second hand boats don’t come with a manual) the day came for us to sail it around the island from Douglas to Peel. In those 30 miles we burnt over 75 litres of diesel, none of the gauges worked properly and there was a whole host of electrical gremlins. The joys of buying a boat. Several thousand pound and 3 months later the boat is just about at a point where you would trust it to go out to sea and at the very least not blow up its batteries. So from July to October all the spare time and money I’ve had has been thrown in to making a bad buy good, I haven’t been fishing since the 21st of July.
But what about everybody else? The fishing around the Isle of Man over the later parts of the summer has been little short of outstanding. We’ve had a bumper Mackerel season in 2020, that’s meant a great year for Tope, absolutely loads being caught from the shore in the north of the island and some 40-50 pounders in among them. Bass you ask? There has never been a season like it for Bass fishing around the Isle of Man, I’ve seen catches of 15+ fish in a few hours from the shore, all on light spinning gear. There have even been a few cod around this year as well. After what has been a quiet few years for the little orange buggers it’s great to see a few decent fish turning up on the inshore rock marks again. How much as all this to do with a lack of commercial pressure? Over one year I’d say nothing at all, the Bass have been heading up for years.
I’ve spent a huge amount of time in Peel over the last couple of months and have seen how busy the breakwater has been, not my idea of fun but the fish have been there in numbers. Same down Port St Mary and the old breakwater in Port Erin has been a popular spot as well. The short version of all this is that it’s been a bumper late summer for sea fishing around the island. My main hope is that I have everything in place to get the new boat out fishing next year and that the fishing is at least as good as this year. We can all live in hope right?