Weirdo fish – 5-Bearded Rockling

Not only a weirdo fish, but the scene in which I caught him was bizarre. What followed afterwards was even weirderer.

The scenario… fishing my usual spot, one line is out on a leger, the other with a float. Reckon I see a nibble on the leger so start to wind in. It becomes apparent that, not for the first time, I’ve caught the bottom. But this time, the 3lb weight is well and truly wedged in some enormous crevice (wahey) and is not coming loose any time soon. Inevitably, the line snaps, stealing my rig. Given the dark, I decide I’ll just fish the float until I get bored. Reel it in for a recast, and hey presto, she’s snagged as well. *Snap*. Line goes. In the space of a minute, I’ve lost both rigs. Sat on the rock, watching my posh float with the luminescent tip in, finishing off the rest of my beer, I notice that it’s not floating anywhere. Nope, the line is still good, the float is floating, but clearly it has snapped in such a way that it’s not going anywhere. And, presumably, still baited up. And yes, it was. For 5 minutes later, the float disappears, with all the telltale signs of there being a monster of a fish on there. Typical.

The end of the story, that is not. I rigged a lure on to one of the lines, which is nothing more than a 3 pronged really bloody hooky hook with a fake fish, figuring that if I can cast over the float line, I might just be able to reel it in. And on the third attempt, I achieved just that. Started reeling in, where it became quickly apparent that the monster of a fish I’d caught, was no monster at all. But a species I’ve never seen before.

I called it a night there, packed up, went home. In the light of the house, I inspected the fish. By my reckoning, a 5-Bearded Rockling. Ever seen one of them before?

And he was nowt but a wee nipper of a thing. And still alive. With a hook in his mouth. With a huge pang of guilt, I quickly performed an emergency hookyoctomy (or whatever you would call removing a bigass hook from the stomach of a small, very wiggly fish, who was not too amused and me, my hands and a crap disgorger being in its mouth). In a bowl of water, he was still there. Only just mind. Into a water tight bag he went, and I legged it the half mile or so it is back down to the fishing mark, to set him free back into the wild, where, as far as I could tell from the dim light of my torch, he did swim away.

So he might have made it. Bit of a pavlova all round.