Mackerel, one of our Favorite Summer Fish

We all love a good Mackerel fishing session, so I thought i'd go through fishing for them for any members who are thinking about fishing for them, maybe on their summer hols this year.



Firstly, a dead Badger will not eat a Mackerel, this just doesn't happen.

Seriously though,

To start with you'll need either a beach caster, spinning rod or even a carp rod will do the job.

The spinning rod is a lightweight rod designed to cast a lure, usually a dexter wedge of about 1-2 oz.

This is cast out and slowly retrieved until a fish grabs it, you then keep the rod tip up & steadily retrieve till you get in the surf, you may have to pause, keeping the tension on, until the right wave comes to bring the fish in.

If you are not going to keep the fish, (maybe its too small) then DO NOT TOUCH IT.

Take hold of the lure and gently shake the fish off back into the surf.

The beach caster is a bigger animal, designed to get a 3-4oz weight 100 yards or so out to sea.

The usual thing to attach is "feathers" 3 or 4 hooks with feathers or other sparkly lures attached to them.

These are cast out and then retrieved, pulling the rod sideways and then winding in when you point the rod back towards the sea.

This mimics the action of the baitfish that the mackerel are hunting. Its not uncommon to hook 3 at a time.

The main problem we see with fishing newbies is that no one has told them about "Shock Leaders"

This is a special type of line that must be tied on the last 10 or so yards of the mainline.

The average mainline on a fishing reel is between 12 & 20 lbs breaking strain. This will snap off on casting with a 4oz weight.

With shockleader the rule is 10lb of breaking strain to every 1oz of lead weight.

So if you are casting a 4oz weight, you will need a 40lb breaking strain shockleader.

Also check the breaking strain of the feathers that you buy, many of the "pretty ones" are for boat fishing where there is no casting and are only 20-25lb breaking strain, those would break with a 3oz weight.

To kill the fish instantly, grip the body in a towel with one hand, put the index finger of your other hand in its mouth, your thumb firmly on the back of its neck behind its head and very quickly bring the head back to snap its spine.

Not nice but better than letting it flap about and suffocate.

Finally, keep your catch cool.

Some of us going on a session will freeze ice cream tubs of salted water, this takes days to freeze as it freezes at a much lower temperature than pure water.

A block of that in a bucket of sea water will keep the catch cold till you get home.

Mackerel fat will break down into Histamine on a hot beach in as little as half an hour, that could kill you if you don't have an anti histamine or an epi pen.

For a short session, dig down into the shingle and bury your catch in the wet gravel, that works well, but remember where you've burried them :DOH:

Tight Lines,

Zig

 

What licence do you need to fish?

 

You don't need a licence for Sea fishing, unless you are fishing for migratory fish like Salmon and Sea Trout. If we catch those by accident, we put them back rather than getting a £5000 fine & all your fishing gear confiscated:DOH:

Likewise, the Environment Agency introduced a ban on Eel fishing some months back, not allowed to take Eels anymore, the ban extends 6 miles out to sea too.

 

Yum, fresh mackerel staight out of the sea, nothing could be finer. Many years since I've eaten that. It's all frozen nowadays.

 

I've got a fair way to travel to the coast whatever direction I go in, so to avoid a wasted journey I first of all check for a few days when there will be spring (highest) tides around dawn which will mean a good depth of water, some hours of darkness on a rising tide to get fish closer in, less people/more room on the beach and most importantly, either free car parking or only about 30p to pay before I leave.

I'll monitor the wind speed and direction for several days beforehand and cancel if I think there's been too much onshore wind that will colour the water up close in and send the mackerel out of casting range. Leaving shortly after midnight, I'll arrive in darkness, buy a parking ticket and have 30 mins or so sleep before heading off for the waters edge. What I'm hoping for is the line to go tight on the very first pull meaning 5 mackerel on the end.

If you're on a shingle beach like Chesil it's fairly easy to kick a hole in the gravel and partially bury your bucket to keep it cooler. Don't forget to take a towel for cleaning your hands. I also take a collapsible PVC bucket with a short length of rope attached to get some sea water for washing the fish.

I try to fillet and vacuum pack (battery operated vacuum packer) most of them and laying the packs flat in the bottom of two 22 litre electric chiller boxes (lined with plastic as blood can escape and get though small cracks and inside the box itself) covered with large one litre frozen chiller blocks. One of those small rucksack/seat combinations makes the operation far more comfortable than trying to both sit on your bucket and keep removing fish from it.

Whilst I'm doing this I'll cast out the head & guts from the first fish at short range for a bass and put it in a tripod. The rest of the heads get bagged up to use as prawn or conger bait. With a bit of luck I'll have all my mackerel sorted out, a gutted bass to go with them and be out the car park before I have to pay another 30p.

If it turns out to be one of those occasion when there's vast shoals of fish throwing themselves at your hooks and I want to prolong the experience further, I'll either change to a muti-section travel spinning rod I always have with me, or my travel fly rod, or a bit of both, and start catching single fish.

P.S. I normally leave the money + SAE with a tackle shop on my last trip of the year, but if I forget I check out the following year's tides either from online phases of the moon (a couple of days after new or full moon for spring tides) or in a bit more detail by using The Climbers' Club and adjusting the times to another location using the differences from somewhere like Tide Times (who only publish times for something like 7 days in advance).

 

Nice one Scrunge,

Did I mention that West Bexington and West Bay car parks are free from 6pm to 6am now About time.

I use the BBC Tides site,

BBC Weather | Tide Tables

They've got pretty much every port covered, just go into the section for your region & search for the nearest place to your fishing venue.

 

The trouble with those (and most other) tide timetables is that they only go 7 days ahead, so aren't any good for checking which weeks to book for next year's hols, which is why I use other tide/moon tables. There's a whole year's tables here Watchet, Somerset Tide Tables which need 30 mins adding to them to adjust for Chesil.

What I didn't mention was that above was my planning for a flying trip, fishing an early morning tide, doing something else during the day, another bash in the evening, but well away from the crowds you get around the Chesil beach car parks, and then back after they've gone and it's free/cheap parking overnight, and leaving for home after another catch in the morning, but that will probably just be left in the bucket with some frozen blocks on top and be dealt with on my return.

If I'm on a week's family holiday I try and plan it so that one of the last mornings of that week are the most suitable. Too many holidaying anglers catch heaps of fish and don't have anywhere to keep it frozen until their return. What I like about the Parkdean caravans at West Bay is that so many of them have small freezers, and the pitches at Seadown Campsite at Charmouth all have electric hookups and I have 2 mains converters for my 2 electric chiller boxes.

 

What caused the sudden upsurge in Mackerel
Up to 1970 it was classed as a sewer scavanger fish and was not touched with a barge pole
Now it is the healthy fish , smoked Mackerel fresh Mackerel

I just can not bring myself to touch it after all the warnings given in the 50's/60's

Have they changed their diet?

Jack McHammocklashing

 

There are lots of strange rumours about fish, mullet is the other one. People say they hang around sewer pipes and so won't eat them.

Far from the truth, a Mackerel chases small bait fish, not poo, that doesn't move quick enough for them to be interested.

I check the stomach contents of the fish i've caught, to see what they were chasing, recently it has been baby sandeels.

later in the year it will be sprats.

The Icelanders still consider the Mackerel to be a "dirty fish" which make me wonder why they have decided to fish it to extinction

Oh, I remember now, its because they have gone bankrupt and Japan has stopped buying Whale meat off them:DOH:

Any posters here from Iceland that can justify killing a mammal with an explosive harpoon and claim that is humane, please feel free to tell me

Sorry, I digress.

Try a Mackerel Jack, its a very tasty oily fish that is very good for you.

You wont be dissapointed.

 

I've just lunched on some mackerel I caught this morning, filleted and fried and served with peas picked 30 mins before boiling together with some fried charlottes (from my potato bags) boiled yesterday, served with apple wine made from juice pressed from my apple trees, one of my favourite meals.

Some more will be fried/grilled and served with potatoes and garlic scapes (just eaten all the peas!), some soused and eaten cold with our salad stuff and some used to make pâté served on home made bread. I'm never disappointed.

 

Sounds great Scrunge, a man after my own heart there

If while you are down there and start making your own sea salt, don't do what I did & completely forget about all the anhydrytes & stuff that is also in sea water:DOH:

Mmm, crunchy gypsum sea salt:DOH:

 

Mackerel is one of my favourite fish, but not being an angler I have to buy it from the supermarkets.
Occasionally when I go down the coast I manage to buy some fresh, which can sometimes not be much better than I can buy in Morrisons.
The usual difference is in the size, the shop bought ones are far too small.

 

I had a mackerel session down on Bude beach earlier in the week, caught probably around 60 fish keeping 40, some for eating & the rest for my winter bait supply, the smaller ones I threw back. There was a guy there who I overheard talking about a restaurant he had & his methods were appalling to say the least, his casting was downright dangerous, he didn't look behind him once when whacking his gear out & when he brought the fish in,(often 6-10 at a time), he hauled them out of the water & over peoples heads where his wife & young children quickly took them off the hooks & put them in bin bags alive, you couldn't walk away from your fishing position because he would soon be in there trying to take up as much room as he could & he fouled my line on 3 occasions,(plus he threw a fish towards his family on one occasion that very nearly hit me in the face then just looked at me & laughed). He must have had well over 150 fish & kept every one of them no matter how small, no wonder stocks are getting lower in some areas.

 

The sort of angler that gives so much ammuntion to the anti fishing brigade. No concern for the fish or anyone else for that matter

The only hope we can have is that he and his entire family die of anaphalactic shock, thereby taking themselves out of the gene pool in a spectaclier way.

The fats in Mackerell will degenerate into Hystamine in half an hour on a warm beach, which is why a serious angler will have ice packs and a cool box, or a filleting knife and a brine solution with them.

A dustbin bag full of warm Mackerell is a good way to kill yourself

If you see idiots like that again, you could ask to see a copy of their public liability insurance certificate. Mine is currently £5 million against any fishing accident worldwide.

 

I wonder if this bloke has been up our way recently. All the local fishermen are whinging that Mackerel season hasn't really happened this year. A couple of weeks ago I waited in the queue by one of the boats, only to hear the chaps in the boat report after serving maybe half a dozen people, that there's nothing left to sell.

Its a shame, mackerel is my single favourite fish. I know its not the poshest, but grilled or baked with a bit of thyme and black pepper and it is delicious.