The day started off very foggy. I made my way down to Blue Anchor Bay to meet up with Oggy Bongo (Stu). I recognised a car in the car park which I thought belonged to V8Rob; then we spoke to a dinghy owner who confirmed that there were 2 kayakers out on the water already. The conditions were fantastic – very calm, but with a few fog banks further out. We launched and paddled out across the reef…

We were picking up large shoals of sprats on the fish finders. The bites we were getting, seemed to coincide with the sprat shoals moving through. Fish were few and far between, but Oggy winkled one out. We upped anchor and moved to the other side of the reef on the ebb tide. We also made contact with Rob and Jim on the VHF – they had a couple of fish, but nothing spectactular. I could not get my anchoring position sorted and I kept drifting into the reef.

I also managed to snag the anchor on one of my attempts to move – it finally freed itself after a lot of paddling around, much to Stu’s amusement ! Things were quiet, and Stu decided to head back to the original mark where he had his first cod.

A short time later, I managed a small codling followed a few minutes later by another…

I was using large baits – lots of frozen black lug tipped off with a whole squid on a pennel rig.

Both the codling were full of small crabs and shrimps…

Oggy also had another codling, but things were slow. I called up Rob to let him know we were thinking of heading back in, he had lost his anchor and was also thinking of calling it a day. A few seconds later, we heard Jim on the VHF; “Hang on, I’ve got something decent on here”. We could tell by the tone in his voice that this could be good. Then after a couple of minutes, we heard “You’re not going to believe this, this thing must be 25lbs !”. I had already up-anchored and the ebb was really racing through. I paddled over to Stu against the current; we could see Rob paddling back in, so wee thought we would wait for him and Jim before heading in ourselves.

Once on the beach, the anglers in the small rowing boat also landed. They had had a few small fish like us, and one nicer one of 11lbs. We all waited for Jim to return…

He had put the cod in the hatch of his Big Game. How he got it in there I do not know, it was enormous. I have caught a lot of cod from the shore including a fair few doubles and mid-doubles, but this cod was something else. It made the other cod look miniscule in comparison…

Rob weighed it…. 26Lbs 3 ozs…

Then we all stood around like lemons, gawping at the sheer size of it…

It turns out that Jim and Rob have been having a bot of a ding dong competition with the kayak caught cod. Jim had one of 16lbs a couple of years back, then Rob beat him with one of 21lbs, now Jim has taken the crown with the 26lb fish.

All I can say is well done Jim – it was great to meet you all, and great to be there to witness the whole thing…

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YAWOTpXv-Zc