Steve S

Great trip you had there and great report Charlie, I really enjoyed reading it. Thanks for making the time and effort to write it up. I'm currently in Cambodia in the rainy season, it's worlds away. Lots of fish around here and water! I don't think I'll be writing a trip report, but over a beer!

I don't winterise while my boat is in the water. Except to make sure the outside fresh water shower head is drained down (it cracked once). While on the hard I use a low power heater if it's going to get well below freezing.

I agree with Brian 100%, use a dedicated antenna for the AIS, for the best results from both VHF and AIS, that how I set mine up. The AIS antenna will be about 70cm long. Sharing antennas and reduced signal strength is quite well documented, also the ideal AIS antenna length is different for the VHF as the frequency is different so although it will 'work' it's far from the best. The AIS antenna does not need to be particularly high, on top of the cabin roof is fine, higher is better but the improvement in range is fairly small, mines on the cabin roof and it appears to be good for 10 miles at least for the ships.

The sea horse sounds like a legit catch, guess it was rather hungry...

Tigerfish, no Rays. A late start, Diane doesn't do early! Tried a new offshore mark, lost a tope and that was it. Went over to my banker blond ray bank and it let me down. Failed to catch any fresh mackerel either so fished with frozen the whole time which didn't fill me with confidence. Sounds like I should have fished inshore.

Tigerfish: Steve, Diane (not fishing)

Hi James, welcome Yes it would be but you need to be aware of the sea conditions, in general you should be ok up to a F2-F3. Assuming you are fairly inexperienced being on a boat at sea there are are lots of factors to take into account, wind direction, swell size, tide. Then there's the safety side of things, I'm sure Mal will be able to advise on that.

Clamps over the pipes, great idea, thanks. The motor is defo knackered, the ACU puts up a drive voltage across the motor to make a course connection but the motor does not always respond by powering up to effect the steering change. It might be brushes inside the motor but they are not changeable.

The auto pilot pump on Tigerfish has worn out (auto pilot errors and pump drops out) I've bought a replacement but I'm not sure how best to drain down the hydraulic fluid to a level where I can change the pump without lots of fluid running out the pipes as I replace them. I would like to do the job with the boat still in the water. Boat spec: Twin Volvo D4s with outdrives, cabin and flybridge helm, hydraulic steering. Auto pilot pump fitted in the engine bay. Any advice will be most welcome.

I think it has a lot going for the rescue services, relaying the latitude and longitude is much more error prone and hard for many folks to understand. I think it's usable for fishing marks too, very likely better than passing over the coordinates which has a number of different formats. I hope it does get adopted more widely.

I do take some to eat Jim, we just have enough fish at home at the moment so back it went. The livebait tank that came with the boat is great (aside from eel grass blocking) it allows a couple of big bass to stay alive so decisions about which ones to keep can be made late in the day which saves catch a 3 pounder keep or return dilemma.

I decided to stick inshore for the bass comp; mackerel and scad were few and far between and mostly the ones caught were too big for bait, a herring did also show up, first of the year for me. The biggest of the scad weighed exactly a 1lb. It took well over 2 hours before there were a few decent baits in the live well. When I finally started for bass they were having it but there was a lot of weed around which made it frustrating and I soon ran out of decent bait, not helped by a few dying when the live well filter got blocked with eel grass, that's the second week running that's happened, grrr. Tried a live pollock of probably just under a 1lb and had a couple of takes on that from bass with eyes bigger than their belly, I saw them but they dropped off before I could net them. The biggest of the bass went 6lb 5oz weighted back at the marina for accuracy, I returned it. Others were mostly around 4lb with a couple at 2lb or so taken while fishing for bait.

Tigerfish: Steve and Diane (not fishing) - Saturday

Great stuff, bit of a heart stopping moment there Charlie! For future reference when you next in that lucky position I've found (Florida and Kenya) 'mostly' big sharks do long runs but then will turn back or are prepared to come back to you, so next time maybe let it run till you are almost out of line in the hope it will do so. Another thing on these long runs the drag force gets higher and higher as the diameter of the reel spooled with line reduces, it can make a massive difference so you can need to back off the drag, easy to say but in the heat of the moment easy to forget!

For Alun and I on Tigerfish, the 48 hour comp transmuted to just the Saturday. We had a good day out. First objective find some mackerel, happily we soon saw some terns diving so out with the feathers. We had a mad time catching mackerel of all sizes, out numbered by the bass, some over 2lb, they were coming in thick and fast, great fun 3 at once at times. They were feeding on herring fry. With enough mackerel in the live well we set off for some bigger bass. A bigger one showed up first drift, we had 10 or so of good size mostly between 4 and 6lb. The best went 7lb 9oz. After a fairly early return we gave the boat a good clean down then off to the Mayflower for a pint.