Do you ever get the feeling that you know your target species are there but despite trying everything you can you just cannot snare one? Addicted2Anglings Steve Chambers knows this feeling far to well after his most recent session at his favourite mark chasing some prime Suffolk Estuary cod. 

 Sometimes you just arrive at a venue, take a look around, take in the conditions and just think “yup… today’s the day”

It’s the anticipation and feeling every fisherman craves upon arrival and after the long trek across all the fields to today’s venue of choice, that’s exactly what I found myself thinking. Contrary to the weather forecast, which was predicting a fresh southerly with little or no sunshine, I was blessed with a none existent wind and a rapidly clearing sky which turned the river from an expected lumpy mess to an unexpected and very welcome flat millpond. Beautiful!!

I know that the general consensus for a good days cod fishing is a lumpy sea with lots of colour and I would tend to agree but in the river here, it’s different. Many of my best sessions over the last 20yrs I’ve fished here are when the water has been filthy brown and as flat as a mirror… conditions I pleasantly found myself with today.  It was my dad and I today forging a two man attack on the cod which have proved difficult for us both so far this year.

We were arriving around 3 hours down so we could attack the best part of the tide, last two hours down and first one up, we had armed ourselves with some beautiful fresh blow lug and a few squid as bait. The plan was to also raid the river at low for a few hermits and see  if any were about as these can often be the difference between catching a cod and not, which has been proven many many times over the years.

Normally the river will produce the bearded beauties when it’s really tough elsewhere but this year has been the reverse, a few cod have been caught off the coast but I’ve really struggled to get many out of the river. Me being me though, all this has done is made me more determined to catch one or two from here!

Out went the baits and with a good tide run on the water expectations were set to high, chatter between me and dad soon turned to who was going to get the first one, how many we would catch and who or what we could possibly blame if we didn’t because the conditions were perfect!  It didn’t take long for the bites to start coming and it was clear what the culprit’s were… Whiting. Aggressive bites without really pulling the rod over, not what we were after but we were expecting to find a few so not too disheartening for us. I have to say though, these were some nice whiting we were finding, not the usual plague proportion pins that can be really annoying but some lovely fat, beautifully conditioned and very full fish, several knocking on the door of 40cm. A few of them for tea will do lovely but the focus was solely remaining on trying to filter through these and find a cod.

As we came to low water, and several whiting later, we had to admit that the chances of a cod were slimming by the minute so plan b was put into play and the hunt for hermits commenced. A 15 minute wander along the tides edge in the clearing water will often spook the hermits into a dash to hide,  giving up their positions  and becoming easy pickings for us and with a handful each we quickly set about attacking the last hour we had left.

Bang!!! A proper bite on the Italcanna looked to prove that the crabs had done the business and sure enough, the unmistakable thump on the rod tip as I reeled her in left me no choice but to shout “Cod” up the beach to my dad!  And that was the mistake I shouldn’t have made because within 10 seconds of me dad reaching the shore line to claim the fish, it decided it wasn’t having any of it and quickly kited hard up along the tideline and with a strong shake of its head it was gone…  I was  gutted that I never landed it but at the same time pleased that I had proved there was cod in here, I quickly got baited up and set about the cod mission again. Unfortunately, this was as close as I was going to get today and I had to chalk down trip number 6 here without a cod.

The walk back was full of excuses passing back and forth between us, blaming everyone and everything on the lack of cod on our coast again this year, even giving brexit a gob full of abuse as well!!But I’m going to end it with something that my dad said as we were loading the gear back into the car which was a good analogy as we know there is a few fish in there.  “Ever get the feeling we’re chasing shadows?”