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Sea bass hunting : advice (UK)

Thread Status: Hello , There was no answer in this thread for more than 60 days.
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Big Bass just arrived

I do confirm, big bass just arrived ... here is my buddy last catch...

5.890 Kg, not that bad for the first bass of the season ;)
 

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VERY VERY VERY nice BASS

COngratulations to your friend.

See now i want one too :D

Shane
 
Cece - damn I'm jealous !

Lovely fish.

I went in last night after work for a pale hour - only wrasse. Some quite large wrasse, so I guess I may have to investigate a few new recipes if I don't see any other bass / flatfish / bream soon...

Surely not all the fish are gone from Guernsey waters ?!

Feeling a bit desperate and it might be bad news for wrasse... (just kidding - they are far too friendly to eat).

So how about winter species ?

Are there any cod coming into the shallows ?

Oh - Huan - I still think Elios suits are warmer (despite having only tried Elios and no other brands - yeah I know I cant really compare - but I think a custom made suit in 5mm mid-density heiwa will suit me fine for winter - cheaper than the biotermics therefore the business for me and that's why I recommend them for Pekka - poor-student-type etc >>> also I'll be in Dublin from the 8th November for two weeks. Got a weekend in the middle free - are you close to Dublin ?).

Shane, I can only appeal to your good-naturedness - please, please, please leave my bass alone !

Cheers
Ed
 
Well went out for a low water session with Charlie and a visiting friend from Italy called Fabio - learnt some things from him which was nice - here is Charlies monster bass !

http://www.marineyard.com/fish/bassA.jpg

Shot with a Totemsub Pelagos 100 in quite shallow water while drift fishing.

Pretty nice day and the visibility about 3m or 4m.

Who says the bass have gone !

Shane, we'll keep this one !

Ed
 
Does anybody know how bad/good the vis gets in Devon and Cornwall during Nov-March?

Does nobody spear in the winter then?

Dont understand why, surely there are fish left in the water even bass will not disappear entirely. It is strange because in Greece we shoot large bass mainly in the winter months-the colder the better.
Hoping to have a spearing session sometime next weekend with Pekka and see for myself how feasible spearing really is this time of year. Would be sad to have to wait until spring to start spearing.
 
I cannot seem to se that monster bass pic :(

How much did it weigh?

I would think that over the winter there must be days whebn the water is clear enought for some fishing. Unless there are river outlets close by and the excess rain causes all the shit to be sent down into the sea.

You can keep that one my friend. ;)

mail me the pic if you can

Shane
 
Alison

Thanks for the tip.

Not silly question at all as am new in the area and dont know the spearing scene at all.
Pekka, DB member, has been fishing around here for three years and was kind enough to indicate some good places for spearing. Ill be here for a year as part of my uni course and would like to be able to spear once a week.

Do you also abstain from spearing in the winter months?
 
here are the last bass I caught, 10 days ago, in 2 meters deep;
they are small(1430g for the biggest) but I'm just begginning
117_1777.jpg
 
Well this is my first winter in the UK for 24 years but I doubt I'll get myself in the water again for a while. I did try spearing in the winter some years ago and swore I'd never do it again :( Still if your up for it, try rocky areas near to sand, with some good winter viz there should be some codling, Pollock, flounders even Ling if your up to a deeper dive. I hear there are some big conger down your way in the winter as well in the big river estuaries but I'd make sure you have someone with you as well as a spare shaft or two.
Definatly get in touch with Dave O C he runs the Exeter branch of the BSFA I belive they have some very experienced guys there (not sure if they would be very helpfull though)
 
I was doing a bit of reading about Ormers and the fact that they have been pretty much over exploited in the past meaning that the stocks have never really recovered.
For example :

----------------------
In 1859 F.C. Lukis wrote about the use of shells as in furniture.
"Although the demand for ormer shells is on the decline, one merchant has at least 15 to 20 tons in store" prices fetched 7/6 per cwt, the quantity bought to this merchant is 4 - 9 tons per season. The average weight of a normal shell is 23.9 gm, which would mean 42,500 shells per ton ( this would take 212,500 ormers to make 5 tons of shells!)
----------------------

So half a million to a million ormers.....

And in the 1920's ...

---------------------
In 1923 T.A Stephenson carried out an investigation for the States. He stated that during the preceding 20 years catches had diminished from 10 to 14 dozen to only 3 dozen per head. At his suggestion ormering was suspended from 1924 to 1926.
---------------------

Both of these from (http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/BMLSS/ormer.htm)

Anyway, now you are lucky to get 3 ormers... so I think it is fair to say that the stocks have not recovered. There are probably other factors to do with sea temperatures and so on but basically they were overfished.

Which brings me on to the next topic : BASS !

I have found a few articles in the paper recently about commercial bass fishing.
This is one that I found on line -

(http://www.thisisguernsey.com/code/showarticle.pl?ArticleID=000308)


What a crazy world we live in.

The fact that the commercial fishermen are essentially biting the hand that feeds them seems insane. This is non-sustainable fishing. It is killing the very process, the root, the start of the lifecycle.

I would agree with the author of this article and would support a total ban on fishing for bass during this key period. From all parties. (Personally there is not too much incentive to go in the sea at this time of year)

I think that there should be a boycott by people against buying bass at this time of year too - supermarkets and fishmongers must be better informed than the general public so should be responsible for the fish that they stock on the shelves. Public awareness should riise too - I for one never knew that this was the time that bass bred.

If the sea fisheries officer considers the catch insignificant perhaps they should remove bass from the commercial list and disallow fishing for them commercially. After all if it is insignificant it wont hurt to outlaw the commercial fishing of them...

Maybe this is selfish of me.
Yes, I want a summer where I can drop off into the sea and catch a bass or two.
But also I think that Guernsey could create far more revenue by pushing bass rod and line fishing - hotels would get a decent boost and restaurants too.
Instead of allowing the plunder of fish they should have a lower impact form of managing the stock.

It certainly sounds like the sea fishery dept. is bowing to the commercial needs and greeds.... all too common these days. Short term profit and no consideration of the future. How many 'units' are shipped to Europe.... what is the share price of InterFish (or similar) .... are profits up this month...

There wont be any profits soon if this continues.

I don't know enough about commercial fishing but I am deeply p***sed off with this sort of short sighted behaviour both from the commercial fishermen, the companies, and the States Fishery Dept.

The Fishery Dept. should have more teeth and get on and protect this resource. All of a sudden the fisheries boat - the 'Leopardess' - seems like a strange name for a craft that is more like a tabby-cat.

What is Guernsey coming to. Or maybe it is 'there' already.

Any comments ?

Cheers
Ed
 
--------------------------
Bass breeding ground must be protected
Published 17/2/2005
This month thousands of bass will congregate on the west coast of the island to spawn – many will not survive. One reader is asking whether more should be done to protect the shoal so that it can lay its eggs in safety

The island’s bass stocks are being affected by fishermen from the UK and France plundering the species’ breeding ground just off the west coast. Pictured, the Wiron 1, a Dutch-flagged vessel registered with Plymouth-based company InterFish Ltd, which was accused of pair-trawling off Guernsey in December. It was later cleared of any wrongdoing. (0155116)

LOOK out to sea from Cobo on any day in February and you would be forgiven for thinking a new island had appeared off our west coast.
The mass which at times appears to be a small town is in fact a large fleet of boats packed tightly and vying for pole position over the Boue Blondel reef.
The reason for the gathering is bass. Each year hundreds of thousands of mature bass, from as far away as the south coast of England, make their way down the southern approaches, arriving off our west coast to spawn.
With the water temperature around nine degrees, the huge shoal masses together in a frenzied action and over an eight to 10 week period deposits its eggs on the surrounding seabed. The size of the spawning shoal and subsequent hatch is critical to the survival rate for the slow-growing bass, which take seven to eight years to reach maturity.
As with all natural events of this magnitude, a successful breeding season is by no means assured and is subject to nature’s fine balance. As such, any significant reduction in the hatch, e.g. by removing a large number of mature fish from the shoal prior to spawning, would undoubtedly affect the future number of bass in local waters.

A couple of weeks ago I heard a fisheries officer on local radio reporting last year’s catch as approximately 350,000 fish with an estimated weight of 100 tonnes, figures he appeared to find ‘insignificant in the scheme of things’.
Consider, then, that the taking of a single female bass of 10 pounds in spawn removes over 2,000,000 eggs from the hatch. That data indicates that, on average, only 0.025% of the hatched fry go on to be mature fish; thus the killing of that fish has removed 5,000 bass from the system. No big deal you may think; however, multiply that by a very conservative 100,000 fish and that becomes 500,000 bass.
Half-a-million bass is roughly equivalent to 50% of the UK’s annual commercial catch. Remember those figures are based on 100,000 fish, not 350,000 as reported. In addition to those killed, the continual harassment and disturbance of the fish by the boats and lines would disperse the shoal, enlarging the spawning grounds and thus increasing the effects of natural predation during the hatch.
The Guernsey spawning is not a new occurrence; however, up until a few years ago, the final destination of the bass had not been discovered and the shoal was able to spawn unhindered and in peace. Now the word is out, boats from the UK and France are in position outside our limits from mid January ready to intercept the fish. When the bass finally arrive here, the local fleet is waiting, with some boats catching up to a tonne of fish a day on rods and lines.
By any standards the bass are huge and prime breeding stock;
a large percentage of those caught weigh between 10-12lb, with some fish reaching 20lb. This certainly brings into question the estimated weight of last year’s catch. If the fish caught last year averaged only 5lbs (2.3 kilos), 350,000 fish would weigh about 800 tonnes, which is half as much again as the total UK bass landings for the whole of 2003.

To put that figure into perspective and to underline the impact the actions of the few might have, the UK offshore pair-trawl fleet managed to catch only a little over 100 tonnes of bass last winter.
So what is Guernsey, the island that permits the humble rabbit a breeding season, doing to prevent the bass from becoming a distant memory here? The answer: absolutely nothing. It would appear that our Sea Fisheries is in the pocket of the Fishermen’s Association as it continues to pay only lip service to the issue.
The recent ban on nets and trawling within half-a-mile of the reef was typical of the nonsensical and futile measures our Sea Fisheries implements. Trawling within half-a-mile of the reef would be impractical and non-productive and the tides in that area make netting impossible. As Fisheries well knows, for once local boats with rods and lines, not trawlers and nets, are doing the damage.
I would wager that over the last two years, fisheries officers have spent more time measuring ormers than they have considering the implications of what is happening on our west coast. The Sea Fisheries seems to have adopted a ‘head in the sand’ attitude and we really should question whether:
a) Our fishery is safe in its hands; and b) If we get value for our money from this inert States division.
What is painfully clear is that Guernsey has a duty to protect the breeding shoals. It should immediately ban fishing for bass in the area around the shoals and take steps toward implementing a close season on commercial bass fishing during the breeding season. The benefits of this fishery to us as an island is immense; however, when the bass are gone, they are gone.

Guernsey will not have achieved any significant monetary gain or even had a glut of cheap fish, as most of the catch is destined for Europe. The few unscrupulous greedy individuals will have spent their easy money and turned their attentions to other species.
It would also be a lost opportunity for tourism; indeed Ireland is showing the way forward on sustainable use of bass stocks. In the Republic of Ireland commercial exploitation of sea bass is not permitted and recreational anglers are restricted to retaining a maximum of two per day.
No bass may be retained during the spawning season and maximum and minimum size limits are in place.
While this may appear extreme, the Irish Government has recognised that a properly managed fishery is seriously big business and in south-west Ireland, sea angling tourism is currently valued at £27m. annually. The most recent report predicts this figure will to grow to £40m. within a few years, far more than the commercial bass fishery contributed to the economy and of course it is sustainable.
You don’t have to be Einstein to see the greed of a few is threatening the very existence of the species locally.
Failure of the States to act will be catastrophic for the long-term survival of our bass stocks and they will be destined to follow in the path of the red bream.
For those who do not recall, it was abundant in local waters until it was trawled into oblivion in the late 70s; it’s now commercially extinct.
I would urge anyone with the slightest concern for the health of our sea and the future of our fishery to write to this newspaper and the Sea Fisheries and lobby your deputy – because there aren’t plenty more fish in the sea.

author : rapala9@yahoo.co.uk
--------------------------
 
Nice to see positive publicity for a change.
I for one am glad that the Fisheries board stopped commercial fishing for Bass here in Ireland.
It was rooted in the fact that Bass were nearly wiped out mostly by Gillnet fisherman during the '70s and '80s .
The angling authorities petitioned the minister for the marine to make some kind of effort control and the response was the ban on commercial fishing for them.
Surprisingly it has actually been obeyed and there are people actually checking that fish sold in Restaurant's are legal=Farmed imports.
Bass is the ONLY sea fish protected to this degree in Ireland.
 
Oldsarge imformation only

Dicentrachus Labrax ie Bass is the correct name for this species in European waters.Not seabass
Good hunting Guys
 
Totally agree with all that that, spawning areas are protected in Wales and in England. The Channel Islands needs to move with the times.

Bass are getting hammered generally from all fishing we need to move now to protect the future of this great fish.ere

Theres is far more added value in recreational fishing for bass than comercial trawling to put it on peoples tables.

It should be an expensive and seasonal fish. Not something that can be dished up all year at cheap cost!!
 
john141267 said:
It should be an expensive and seasonal fish. Not something that can be dished up all year at cheap cost!!

This is the point, at no time during the year is Bass cheap, it is always one of if not the most expensive fish in any market.
That is why it is so sought after.
BTW the 2 bass limit is also followed by a minimum size of 40cm.
 
you think that its because its a trendy fish to eat and demand is high that thats why its being targeted so ruthlessly? I'd agree you are totally right.

how do we reduce the demand for this fish i think try and control method of capture so less is available for people to buy.
 
It has only recently become trendy in the UK, France and Spain have traditionally always highly valued this fish.
reduce demand? not possible I am afraid.
Education is the only way forward, and maybe a more enlightened government.
 
Pekka selling speared fish in the U.k is illegal !!! fishery officers take this seriously.
watch out. size limits also apply
 
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