Cliff Tops

 I ventured up to a cliff top venue that can normally be relied upon to deliver a cod or 2. The cliff tops can be very reliable and have the advantage of having no climb down to the waters edge, a nice grassy fishing position and no issues with moving with the tide line. They do however have some noticeable drawbacks, its a long way to winch a reasonable coddling up, if anything goes wrong it's a long way to fall and sadly any fish you don't want to keep wouldn't survive the drop back into the water.

The picture shows my set up. A 15ft Any Fish Anywhere 6 an Bait, Penn Battle 2 8000 with 80lb braid. On the tripod you can see a baited trace waiting to be swapped over baited with cart and squid.

Step Change

 I seem to have been doing a lot of sea fishing recently so I decided to do something a bit different and headed for a quick session on the River Swale near Thirsk looking for Pike and Perch. Unfortunately nothing seemed interested in my lured but it was nice to be out and doing something different.

Another Trip Out

 I was back on the rough ground to catch the last of the swell, fishing cart and squid baits on a pennel pulley rig.

Revelation

 When fishing with cart (a bait made from the insides or female edible crabs) I've found that once the cart thaws and washes out I've been left with very little hookbait for the fish to find. I've found that by using a whole small squid on the hook along with a block of frozen cart there is still plenty of bait left when the cart thaws and melts away. The down side of using a whole small squid is that the bait to be cast out is pretty large which as extra casting weight to the rod and the size of the bait creates a lot of resistance during flight.

I put the plan in to operation during a recent trip to the North Yorkshire coast an it paid off quite well.