Russ Symons explains how the development of a hybrid method of vertical jigging over deep water wrecks in the western Channel has struck both gold and silver with its catches
There is a wreck a long way off, deep into the Western Approaches which has been my nemesis for over half a century. It shows up as a monster on the echo sounder and where, over the years, some wrecks eventually disappear, rusting away until all that is left is some tackle snatching scrimmage showing as little humps and bumps on the bottom. This wreck has not disappeared, remaining as a hulking lump on the bottom!
It has altered over the years, but remains a solid monster, showing up like a block of 1950s flats, and truth be told, it has puzzled me for years. One day, a few years ago, a pal of mine took a party of “gas” divers out to it and the mystery was a mystery no more. This wreck was carrying coal blocks as cargo and the metal of the wreck had rusted away, making it one of the “grabbiest” wrecks I know, but the coal blocks had solidified and turned into a deep-water reef. The divers said that it is a wonderland of urchins, corals and all sorts of wondrous things – with a lot of pollack, cod, ling, pout and monster whiting lurking in the shelter of these walls of calcified coal.
POLLACK JUNKIES
When we first started fishing this wreck, back in the days of Decca and six to seven hours off, in the slow chugging charter boats of that era, RedGills and Eddystone eels on long traces was the method we fished for the pollack, of occasional staggering size. The shoal would often show up as a cloud of fish that would reach up to mid water some days. We learned the hard way to cope with the screaming crash dive, and the adrenaline fuelled high that these superb fighting fish gave us. We became the pollack junkies of the western Channel. Then the gill nets started to thin the shoals, 20lb fish became rarer and rarer until today the netters have almost put themselves out of work, so much have they thinned the once huge shoals of pollack.
But nature abhors a vacuum, so more cod have moved onto the wrecks that once might have produced just a few golden flanked “headbangers” each season. I have to say that cod do not generate the adrenaline rush like a crash diving pollack will, but do they ever make the Brownie points with her indoors! Most of this wreck will reach to 30ft above the bottom, one part still goes to nearly 50ft, and drifting through with Red Gills on a long leader will still take fish, but not in the numbers that used to inhabit the wrecks of the Western Approaches. To be in with a chance of a bumper day you have to fish tight to the bottom and straight up and down – what some people euphemistically call slow pitch jigging.
To be honest, what we do in the 200, sometimes 300, feet of water is not strict
