Runswick Bay Kayak Match

The Runswick Bay annual Kayak Festival and competition is one of my favourite events here in the Uk, it’s a well organised and well run event and always has a great turnout. This year was no exception, people traveled from all over the country to fish the match.
Runswick Bay is my favourite place to fish and I couldn’t wait to get on the water, conditions were not bad, just the wind spoiling it. A stronger than forecast westerly wind would keep the boundaries tight but I knew a few hot spots within the area.

Heading out to the area I planned to fish There was only Sam Baxter and myself who headed out in that direction, everyone headed out into the centre of the bay. Fishing 20ft of water where it drops into 40/50ft of water with an old style pirk and string of hokia lures was my initial plan of attack and on my second rod a twin tail was set up ready for a change, both methods I have done well on.
Arriving at the desired area I set the drouge and started my first drift, within a few feet of the drift I had a take on the hokia and resulted in a good size Mackerel, not a bad start. At that the safety boat come along to see how I was getting on and just as they did I had another take and landed a cod just over 2lb.

The wind dropped and the announcement came over the radio that the boundaries opened and we could head further out, I stuck with this area for now and had a few more fish of similar size. But with the boundaries open I had to head out to Kettleness area where I have had some big fish in the past, the paddle across didn’t take long with the wind on my back and arrived amongst the crowed. But strangely enough nothing seemed to be getting caught.

I ended up catching a few different species but nothing of any size from this area but taking codling, coalfish, pollock and mackerel all on the same method was still great fun.
I paddled back to the first area I fished which was into a very strong head wind which took a bit out of me but I got there soon enough, the two lads who were following me over, one gave up and headed in the other a complete novice came with me, it was his first fishing trip out on a kayak, giving him a few pointers and got him alongside me to show him the features we were looking for and sure enough he caught his first cod on the same tactics as me, that was him hooked. I caught a few more fish including the smallest Codling I have ever caught.

The day was good fun and was great to catch up with people from previous matches and to help someone to catch their fist fish on the kayak.
Thanks for reading, Mike