My First Blog...

Hi this is my first Blog so go easy on me ! My name is Ian Holmes and I live in Norfolk. I've been sea angling for some 30 years now and I'm lucky to count among my personal friends some of the regions and countrys finest sea anglers. Over the coming months I'd like to recount some of my experiences with them, the highs and lows we all encounter in the sport and maybe pass on some of the experience I've gained. I'll start with a recount of a summer sole fishing trip, hope you enjoy it as much as I did....

July 2006

My own fishing has been limited lately. To be honest the weather and sea conditions haven’t been conducive to fishing with bait and with the beaches full of holiday makers it’s been a hard job to know where to go. I managed a few hours with friends recently on Lowestoft South Pier, with sole the target. We got to the pier around 8pm and planned to fish the bulk of the flood and stay on if the fishing was good. We were greeted by a fairly stiff easterly but not too much of a chop on the sea and a nice colour in the water. We had the pier to ourselves except for a couple of guys who were packing up as we arrived, so things were looking promising. Now I love sole, they look almost prehistoric; I get the same feeling when I catch rays. Add to that the fact that sole taste great and they’re pretty feisty for their size and you can see why they’re one of my favourite summer species. So despite the easterly breeze, I thought conditions were good enough to give us all a fair chance of a slip or two.

Anybody that’s fished for sole knows they can be fickle. Some days you’ll have the rod bucking over or dropping back with slack liners other days you’ll hardly see the tip move. One thing I reckon is a must for sole fishing is the boom. French booms, spreaders, call them what you like but you want the bait nailed to the sea bed and booms help you do that. Some say that the sole pick up the electrical impulses created by the metal boom reacting with the salt water, I don’t know if that’s the case but they work for me. Small hooks are vital too; if you’ve ever seen a sole’s mouth you’ll know why. The fish’s mouth is a crescent shape and even a reasonable sized fish will struggle to get anything bigger than a 1/0 in its mouth. It’s tempting when using small, fine wire hooks to pull them straight to get them out of deep hooked fish, DON’T. If you’re returning the fish, cut the hook length as close to the fish’s mouth as possible, the hook will rot out in time. Its easy to replace a hook length on a boom and you could even tie a few up before you go and have them ready to loop onto the booms with a simple double overhand knot.

My rigs for the night were 2 hook boom rigs. Size 4 kamasan fine wire hooks on 6” long; 25lb breaking strain, black amnesia hook lengths. The hook lengths were tied to 6” Gemini booms. I fish one of the booms down by the lead and the other just far enough away from the lead to stop the two hooks tangling. Gemini manufactures a selection of different booms, some you can actually clip the lead to, I use these for my sole fishing. The lead needs to be just heavy enough to hold bottom in whatever tide there is. Bait was lug and rag, I only put enough bait on to cover the hook and I don’t mind one bit if the bait is dead, I reckon sometimes sole like it that way, nice and smelly ! Either way, size your bait to the target fish and don’t overload the hook like you might for round fish. All of my fish were caught casting as far away as I could from the pier and any disturbance.

Back to the fishing, we had a cracking time. I think probably because I’m spoiled with the choice of beaches locally, I don’t normally fish the piers, however given the company I knew it would be a laugh if nothing else. Between the five of us we had 10 soles, 3 eels and a couple of dabs before packing up around midnight. I had 5 soles between 10oz and a pound, Terry Smudger Smith had the biggest at 1lb 3oz and Karl Gibson had all the eels and a couple of slips. Keith Hall and Johnny Everett chipped in with a sole and a dab each. According to my esteemed friends I was on a nest of them, seeing as I had all of them fishing within 20 yards of me, I reckon it was my superior rigs!


Here's a sole Smudger caught at Aldeburgh, this one went 1lb 15oz, they get a "shoulder" on them when they're proper big.