I have never been wrecking and have seen the pictures of the massive fish brought up from wreck in the English Channel, so when Reg Talbot and I were talking about fishing trips, we decided to give this a go. Sadly, we hadn't done our homework fully; we had the rods and line of 40lb but expected to anchor beside the wreck and bait fish, but the modern approach for pollack and cod is to drift across the wreck with lures. Alan, the skipper and his wife, Hilary, helped us out giving is wriggly worms (black plastic worms with a red tail which flapped in the tide upon retrieval) with an 8-10 oz lead to keep them down.
We headed out at 6-30 am to the first wreck and I quickly caught a pouting, but the sport was slow, and we made several drifts across each wreck hoping to find the jackpot. However, sport was not helped by three trawlers in the area, one of which seemed to follow us from wreck to wreck even though we were between 10 and 20 miles offshore.
The technique used is very simple, tie the lure from a boom to stop it twisting about the main line,, with the weight attached to the bottom point of the boom. We were given a great tip - to attach the lead with a plastic caoted wire like the ones used to tie up loaves, making five to seven turns around the lead and the boom. When the weight inevitably gets stuck, this wire becomes unravelled under load losing the lead, but allowing the boom and lure to be rewound, and it worked brilliantly. So this set-up was dropped with thumb pressure on the spool gently slowing the descent and preventing an overrun when it hit bottom. Six turns of the reel were quickly made to get the lure above the wreck, and then a slow retrieve of about 30 turns was made before letting the weight drop and repeating the process.
The key factors are the rate of retrieval, the colour of the lure, and fishing at the height where the fish were. The few cod that were caught we in the first 10 or 12 turns, whereas the pollack were higher in the water.
We both caught about 7 or 8 fish ranging from mackeral and scad to pouting and pollack, with Reg catching the best fish shown in the photograph.
We both learned a lot on the day and would be better prepared next time with a wider selection of lures. However, we can't fault Alan, the skippers efforts as we didn't get back until after 8pm (nearly 14 hours) and it cost only £40.
The only downside was we didn't meet Bogey or Katherine Hepburn, but we will try again.