As it’s been for a couple of years now, my vacations are dictated to by the Welsh Premier League fixture list. Therefore with The New Saints away at Llandudno on Saturday and then back at Park Hall on the following Friday, that sorted our late autumn break. It worked out well, that prior to getting involved in Welsh football, we took all our holidays in the country anyway.
Plus – and it is a massive contributory factor – I have a great wife. Whether it’s pleasure (fishing) or work (football) there are no issues. We’ve been to the north Wales town of Kinmel Bay a number of times in recent years, and that was the destination this time round as well. One thing we have never done is let the weather affect us, and with very wet and very windy on the forecast for the week, that was a good thing.
My intention was to fish the beach in front of the caravan park. It’s familiar territory to me and I’ve done well with daytime dabs in recent visits at this time of the year. However, my attempts to tackle it were well and truly defeated by the extremely strong winds that blew in off the sea. It was impossible to hold bottom and the leads were constantly driven into near-side rocks resulting in lost tackle. Plus, I lost count of the times rods and tripod were blown over.
Anyway, I headed to Rhyl, fishing just downstream of the harbour into the Clwyd estuary. As you can see in the video, it proved a productive move. I lost count of the whiting I caught – I had a bite every single cast. The session ended on a high as such with the landing of two decent fish. Remember that whiting aren’t big anyway and shore-caught ones will always be smaller. Therefore the double-header gave a lot of personal satisfaction.
In addition I caught a flounder, which is always the species I hope to bank when I’m in that spot. My first sea fish, many years ago, was a flounder from Rhyl harbour, that’s why the venue and species are never far off my radar when I’m in the area. The birding was good during the week with the likes of curlew, redshank, little egret, turnstone skylark and stonechat all getting ticks. Fnally, why not give my Facebook page a ‘like’ (you can find it elsewhere on this page). I share a lot of different stuff on there. (Published November 14 2015)