Fishing experiences
After knee surgery kept me off the golfcourse in 2004 I really got into seafishing seriously. I'm a member of the seafishing forum www.zeevissen.com and participate in the club competitions. Not without any success as I did manage to win the 2006 overall club competition and three of the 2006 events in the process. But it is a small club so I won't get ahead of myself, haha!! However I will try to qualify for the 2007 national shore angling
championship. We'll see.
But mainly I just enjoy fishing the beaches of Scheveningen and the harbour area Europoort. There are also some reports on my regular fishing trips to Denmark and summer fishingbreaks on the motorbike in the holiday section of my homepage. You'll also see a few pics from bass-sessions off Scheveningen beach.
The sea to me is always a nice and relaxing place to be. Even when it is as crowded as it can get when the weather is good. In wintertime you would expect to catch some flatfish but mainly small cod, usually a bit bigger than this minute one my dad caught.
Come summer the range of fish you can catch changes. There may still be a cod or 2 around, but there will be garfish (left), mackerell, and twaite shad. All great fun to catch on a spinning rod.
Also summer is the time for bass and sole. Both of them are very good eating fish and best caught at night. Well worth sacrificing a few hours of sleep for!
Marathon at Wijk aan Zee, September 2004
A sea fishing contest lasting 30 hours may sound like a mad idea. And it certainly was, but I wouldn't have missed it for the world!!! It was organised by the internet forum www.zeevissen.com and much more professionally organised than I had anticipated. It was a strange idea to arrive in the town and to see billboards, it really was a special event. I'll not get too deep into the results, I caught around 15 fish and ended up somewhere in the middle but that was not really the point. It was an event that really tested your stamina and was great fun. The next one will be in the winter of 2005 and I reckon I'll be there too. Here's a small collection of pictures (not all taken by me) to give you an impression. Move the cursor across the pics for the comments.
Denmark April 2004
Early april 2004 I went to Denmark again, not to catch the elusive seatrout but this time to do some ledgering for codling and flatfish. I was very lucky to have such sunny weather, I never expected that. So I didn't bring the suncream and was burnt pretty badly :-( Fishing in Fredericia is comfortable. Just park the car in the harbour (on the quay I mean), take five paces and start fishing. No big fish and no big numbers either, but enough to keep it interesting. The codling in the pic on the left felt much bigger, that was caused by the clump of mussels that were attached to the other hook. Disappointing!!! The flatfish I caught were all about this size, in dutch waters we would call this a big flounder.
What came to me as a surprise was that you can catch herring from the shore in Fredericia. With small feathered hooks you would sometimes get 3 at the time. I brought a bunch of them home so a friend is going to smoke them for me, see how that tastes. Definitely yummy is fresh codling in the frying pan. Sorry, this time I didn't return all the fish. But a man has to eat, right?!?
A good 7-hour drive from home is Denmark, a very pleasant country. Fishing is different from home, catching cod from the shore in midsummer!!
The seatrout I wanted to catch managed to shake the hook so I'll be back for that, but bass when hooked doesn't come off as
easily.
The nice thing about shore fishing abroad is the variety of fish that surprise you. Like the
poisonous big weever. All over the place in north-east Denmark. In most seas you'll catch garfish in the summer. This one is at Scheveningen harbour.
Spectacular jumping fish that looks like a silver eel with a toothy heron's beak. It looks like something out of a nightmare
but they can't all look like Jenifer Lopez now can they?
You also need to take a little care when handling dogfish, the tiniest of sharks. We caught a lot of these
from the shore in Wales, Aberaeron. Most of them at night. Though they would try and bite the
trickiest bit was to keep them from twisting the tail around your wrist, taking the skin clean off.
Here is me with a small one at night and Peter with 2 at a time at daytime.
Here's some testimony to my fishing roots. As soon as I could swim my parents let me roam the canalbanks. This is me
on the bridge in front of our flat, my 'little sister' Liesbeth watchin over me ;-). I guess fishing was always a
great excuse to dodge sunday school and church. But sometimes I would actually catch fish too. This is a pike that
I caught when I was about 8 years old I guess. The neighbourhood must have been sick and tired of me. Whenever I caught
a sizable fish I would scream and shout until my dad came downstairs to approve of the catch.
Later on I would be after carp most of the time. Here's some specimen that were abundant in the canals
in the seventies. Strange thought that most of the fish have died because the canals weren't dug out anymore
for environmental reasons. The muck they dig up can't just be dumped on the banks as they used to do as it is regarded as chemical waste and needs to be processed accordingly. As the local governments are short of funds they just don't clean them anymore, so they fill up with rotting leaves and such, become shallow and by now they contain very few fish and small ones at that. Bummer!!
