Dilemma or what. One if my big targets for 2018 was a bigger species count. Yet 9 months in I’m not doing well at all. And to make it worse, when I have had the opportunities to fish, well I can’t stop concentrating on the first fish I catch even if it’s one I don’t need to up my tally.
Since the freshwater season started for me in June, I have only targetted perch so far and every time I go back to my local canal, I can’t resist fishing ultra light and putting my lures in the margins that look perchy. Learning about these fish and the different styles of lure they will take in different ways is addictive.
As for saltwater……Absolute pollocks haha. My early sessions were taken over by herring fever. Those little shiny critters fight so hard for their size it’s makes them too much darn fun to switch off them once you find them. 2 sessions in I’d had loads of herring and several small pollock as bycatch. The simplicity of using a small jig head close to the surface and the visual takes followed by a hard dive really gets the fishing cogs in my brain going into overdrive.
When Simon from Osborne and Cragg (my favourite tackle shop in opened a species comp me and Owen had a session where we tried a few rockpools etc for some mini species, but even that day we spent half the day catching common blennies just because their aggression made it so much fun. We ended up hardly catching any other species.
My mackerel sessions this year were really pollock sessions as each time I went I hooked up a pollock within 2 to 3 casts and then started concentrating on them as no one around seemed to be having a lot of success on the mackerel.
So how do I switch of when catching fish and target something else?
If you want to find out more about catching UK fish on lures, I strongly recommend you try this great book here which provides info on everything you might want to know about lure fishing in the UK and how to catch a huge variety of species
How To Trick A Fish 