The Bull Nose - Preston Docks

Thursday 14th May 2015

This blog post has taken a while to get out there compared to some recently but I'll be honest up front now and say that it has taken me this long to get over the shame of being beat by my mate Novice Dez. Now, nearly a week later, I have gotten over myself and am ready to spill the beans. 

A voyage of re-discovery, that is what sea fishing has become for me over the last 12 months as I look to get back into this side of the sport that I had been on a long hiatus from. With my good pal Danny, as you may have read, we recently fished Rossall beach near the 5 bar gate. It was on the way home from that session we were talking about the options of fishing Preston docks as we had read about on the Internet.

Good fortune saw Danny be able to fish the docks for the first time shortly after the rossall session and then fish it again on the Monday night preceding my visit. He told me that he had fished from high tide down to low water and had around 8 decent sized flounder. So my plan on this Thursday was to fish the tide up to high water and do a kind of comparison to help better plan future visits. A quick text chat with Novice Dez and we had agreed for a Thursday night session and I was picking him up from the docks McDonald's (him and a couple of Big Mac meals) ready for the evenings session.

When we arrived, we were the only anglers on the bullnose so pretty much had our pick of areas. As we had never been there before we had no previous  experience to guide us so I decided we would fish from the wall near a bin, the lid of which had clearly been used as a bait table many times before so if nothing else, I knew folk had fished this area. 

I set both of us up pretty quickly and as a bit of an experiment to see what is the better options, I set Dez up with a paternoster rig where as I had a running leger set up. I figured we could compare the 2 and see which is best. As the water was quite low at this stage, there wasn't much pull on rigs so we could get away with relatively light 4 oz plain weights. Nice and easy. What transpired though was a quiet  session as we approached high tide. No bites registering and the only sign was Dez who had somehow managed to hook through the eye of a swivel on somebody else's lost rig, he reeled that in and the attached Flounder that came with it. I had to make it quite clear to Dez that in our usual mini-competition that I like to have, that this fish didn't count as he didn't hook it - but I did claim the free grip lead that came with it.

As the tide rose, a few other anglers turned up and these guys seemed to know what they were doing. Figuring they were regulars, I watched them set up and they were all using paternoster rigs with heavier grip leads. I changed my rig to a paternoster rig after this but I did wonder why they felt the need for a grip lead - I didn't have to wonder for long though as the pull of the tide seemed to increase dramatically and I was no longer able to hold bottom. I quickly switched both me and Dez onto 6oz grip leads and we were soon back in business but I was surprised by how much the tide pulled here.

About half an hour before high tide the water slackened off and as if by magic we started getting bites. Dez managed to land a better flounder before I got off the mark with a mini one. I missed many bites though, either from being too keen and hitting them too quick or I left them too long - either way it was getting frustrating. Dez made matters worse for me as he added 2 more flounder to his tally before the end of the night. Novice Dez had beaten me 3-1 or 4-1 if you could the snagged rig fish.

So as the session drew to close, I had a think about how it had gone. It was clear from this one session that the flounder seemed to feed better when the water wasn't pulling as much. So with this in mind, the next session I try down there will be planned to start about an hour to half hour before high tide and fish it out. Hopefully that will see a better return. I'm also hoping that I can get some better bait for next time, this session was using up bait that I had in the freezer and had been defrosted and refroze a few times, so it wasn't the best. Interestingly, Danny had mentioned to me that he had taken fish on isomes when he went, the sandy coloured ones in particular. I tried this myself and had no joy, in fact the one fish I had was caught in a 2 hook flapper rig, the top hook using black lug and the bottom using an isome and it was the lug that took the fish. 

Anyway, that was that for Preston docks first outing. I will be returning as it is an easy place to fish with only short chucks and the relative comfort of being able to fish out of the boot of your car as well. I just hope the fish are more obliging next time I go.