If there is a word in the English language that really pee’s me off, it is that word "can’t". It is a word that I suspect has stimulated more innovation and dogged hard work by the "awkward brigade" than any other…. anything to work one up the politically correct and pretty boys who seem to have taken over… come the revolution we will put things right again!!

Anyway off the soapbox and back to the thing that matters… the fishing!

It was a welcome little window in the weather, early in July. A couple of days when the grey weather seemed to be catching its breath before dumping a few more million gallons of wet and windy rain on us. Friday the wind dropped to 2 knots.

Saturday morning the alarm went off at crack of sparrows. A little over an hour later, in glorious early morning sunshine, we were steaming across Plymouth Sound pointing South by West toward the great reefs of the Hands Deep, Hatt Rock and other assorted lumps and bumps that hold a population of hard fighting reef pollack, with an occasional cod thrown in to add spice to the proceedings. It wasn’t flat, there was a good deal of residual swell, but the sun was shining and we were going fishing! The original plan was to go up East toward a tide rip and a lonely inshore wreck that holds a few Bass, but the way the wind had been blowing in the past week, added to the direction of the tide, that bit of water would have been like a maelstrom, so we decided that we would go West to that incredible wilderness of reef that has exerted such an addictive fascination over me for most of my lifetime.

Between the pair of us, Russ Weston and myself, we had a bagful of the new Snowbee Stinger jigs. These were small ones, baby jigs weighing in between 80 and 120 grams. Not heavy enough for the 200 to 300 feet of water on the wrecks that we often fish, but heavy enough to fish a hundred feet of water with a 12 lb outfit and skinny Power Pro line.

I know full well that some of the professional Cornish bass men have been using a slim 7 inch conventional sandeel jig for many years and on occasion have had some bumper days using them. But these Japanese designed Stinger jigs are something else. In my humble opinion, when we find the big shoals of fish later in the year they will be absolutely, totally, lethal.

Before time that we had some finding out to do, how to rig them, how to fish them and check out the gear we were using could do the job, that is what today was really all about, something of a rehearsal!

The end tackle was a standard 25 feet of fluorocarbon (mono if you feel so inclined) joined to the braid with doubled line from a 2 foot long Bimini loop using an Albright knot. This is the most reliable set up for joining braid to mono, believe me I have tried them all. The Bimini/Albright combination is the best, most reliable join there is and it will cost you a cold pint to argue about it... With jigs all knotted on we were ready to rock and roll.

First off, we had decided to fish the "Wall" on the Hands Deep. This is an undersea cliff dropping away to a virtually flat bottom, the fish hang off the back of the cliff sheltering from the rush of water, waiting in ambush for the shoals of sandeel’s, mackerel and herring that get caught in the accelerated, turbulent water rushing over the top. The Lowrance soon had them spotted and in went a marker on the nav screen.

Motoring uptide we "guesstimated" where the drift would take us and as the "snail trail" drawn on the nav screen showed us, we were not far off. As the boat drifted close to the mark we tossed the Stingers thirty feet or so downtide, so that by the time we would be over the fish the jigs would be deep down amongst them and the line almost vertical.

By the time we had fished a couple of drifts caught a few fish each, we were being crowded by another boat which had seen us catching and decided he was going to have some of the action. The way he was fishing, I think he was probably disappointed!

Sandwich in hand, off we went to the westward, heading toward the Brendon’s. The Brendon’s are a collection of small rocks a few miles to the west of the Hands Deep rocks. Over many years of fishing them, I believe they are like a rest area on a motorway, on a good day they can be full of fish, on a bad day, which could be the very next day, the fish are gone and they might not show again for weeks. But get it right and its good fishing. Today was to be a good day!!!

We called up the numbers on the menu and went for a looksee. The first lump showed a few fish, but there was a scraggy looking dahn marker slightly to the north of the mark and I reckon a netter had cordoned the area off recently and sent the fish scurrying to somewhere safer.

The second lump showed a few fish uptide of the rock, but to our amazement the shoal of fish were hanging back forty or fifty yards, way downtide from where they would normally be found. Don’t ask, I don’t know why that should be! But we had found them…

Another marker on the nav screen to indicate where the fish were holding and then working on the same drift pattern as up on the Hands, we positioned "Deep Blue 2" for the drift.

Thirty feet from the marker we tossed the jigs downtide and let them sink till they tapped bottom, a couple of very quick turns to get them clear from the rocky snags and we settled into the "quicktime jigging cycle" which has proven to be so lethal over the wrecks. Its difficult to describe the "cycling" motion in words, see it once and you will have it. Basically it consists of moving the rod tip just a couple of feet up and down at the same time as reeling quite quickly.

Boy, did those reef pollack love those Stinger jigs. By the end of the third drift we decided to return those fish that would go back and those that wouldn’t we knocked on the head. Shortly after midday my friend Murray Collings on the Looe charter boat Swift came over to have a natter. He knows that mark better than us, so we left him to it and bimbled our way back to Plymouth…. Boat on auto pilot with both of us cleaning fish for best part of the way in. Fish pie here we come!!

Those Snowbee Stingers had raised a very interesting question, could we have caught more fish had we been using live sandeel?

I don’t think we would have, in fact I think we would have caught less, because the drifts would have had to be longer, to allow the eels to reach fishing depth. Instead the short, focussed drift, combined with the Stingers lethal fish catching ability meant that we had more time over the fish and because of that we caught more. Which raises the question do such lures as the Stinger make bait fishing redundant for predatory fish like Pollack, Cod and Bass over wreck, or reef….

Now this my friends, is what some would call "a can of worms!".

PS. We lost one jig between us, in about five hours concentrated fishing.