Tope.

Done quite a bit of sea fishing thanks to my good friend John who had a motor Boat mored at Porth Madoc.  He also owned a house on the sea fron just by the old castle there.  One simply walked across the road to the beach.. Quite often after a trip he would land us on the beach, moor the boat a couple of hundred yards and swim back to shore.

The first time I fished for tope we were somewhere between Porth Madoc and  Pwllheli about a mile or so offshore in abour 30 feet of water.  We drifted to catch mackerel for bait which was usually pretty easy.  We anchored up, sorted out the tackle with a big hook and wire trace mounted with a whole mackerel at the business end.   Now bear in mind I consider myself a lucky fisherman to the extent some of my friends call me 'golden bollocks -I hope in an affectionate way)

It wasn’t long before I had a take and something took off like an express train. Well a long fight followed but eventually the tope, for that’s what I was, came alongside.  My initital reacton was that if that comes on board I’m getting off.   However John had handled them before and taking hold of a pectoral fin dragged it aboard. A big tope it was too, full of anger and aggressive muscle.  However we managed to unhook it and he persuaded me to hold it up for a photograph, see below

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Not sure quite how much it weighed but judge for yourself.  On later trips I used a 2lb test curve carp road and 25lb line and caught quite a few with that tackle, but nothing as big as that one.   It was great sport.

Late one afternoon after a not to successful day we were on our way back to Porth Madoc when we decided to stop to try and catch something for dinner.  We were only about half a mile offshore opposite the  mouth of the sea trout river river north of the town.   I put a small fish bait on the carp rod and almost straight away something took off for the horizon and I never saw it.  Must have been a tope we thought so out went the tope tackle.   To cut a long story short it seems we had anchored amongst a huge shoal of whitebait and the tope were really onto them. Hard to believe but we had seventeen tope in total one after another that afternoon -never likely to be repeated again I don't suppose.

We used to catch dogfish of course, bull huss, pollack and the odd red bream.  We never caught a bass strangely except that on the one and only occasion one of my sons came with us he had a nice bass on a whole mackerel.  Perhaps the Golden Bollocks tag had rubbed off on him too.