On Wed, 14 Sep 2005 15:17:42 +0000 (UTC), seaside
wrote:

Angus,

Which is fine if that's what you want. Have fun. The OP is beginning
sal****er -fishing- and has been misled into following a standard form that
would result in him catching fewer fish than he might.

Derek has a very good point here, horizon blasting can be necessary
to reach fish on very flat beaches but around your area there's plenty
of deep water close to and you can easily over-cast the fish as they'll
be feeding in the weedy/rocky margins rather than the 'desert' further out.

There are areas where fishing close in demands very heavy tackle
indeed. On the east coast, particularly northwards from Northumberland
to NE Scotland, most anglers use heavy beachcasters and anything from
30lb bs line upwards to tackle the rough ground cod fishing.
The fish are usually close in, and you could quite easily use a carp
rod to reach them, and such a rod would be more than capable of
handling any fish likely to be encountered. What a light rod couldn't
do is get the fish out of the kelp tangles in the first place.
The anglers up there don't use heavy tackle because they're numpties
who don't know any better. In summer many of them use carp and light
spinning rods to tackle the pollack, mackerel and estuary flatties,
and even bass where they're to be found, but experience has shown that
such gear is totally inadequate to bully cod out of the real rough
ground.
Such fishing might not appeal to the 'purist' but demands skills of
its own, and to denigrate the use of beachcasters without taking into
account the circumstances which have led to them being the 'weapon of
choice'in some areas and at some times is as blinkered as saying that
only beachcasters have a place in sea angling.
I use everything from fly gear at one end of the spectrum to heavy
rock rods at the other, throughout the course of a year, and I'd be
hard put to say which gives the most pleasure.

Cheers
Ian D