Maryport Sea Angling club held their last fishing competition of 2023 on Workington Pier. The venue had to be moved after the Storm Gerrit continued to batter the country and make the original venue Silloth Promenade unfishable.

The high wall of the pier facing north gave a nice sheltered venue against the 40-50mph south westerly wind, fishing into the River Derwent estuary.

Twelve members of the club braved the conditions and enjoyed a very competitive match with decent numbers of fish making an appearance. Again though the absence of any cod caught was the norm, sadly this year the cod have not shown up and is worryingly a sign they are being overfished by commercial boats.

The match started off quite slow with only an odd rockling and small pin whiting being caught, then about an hour into the match club member Gary Lawson landed a double shot of a decent sized dogfish and a whiting. This rocketed Gary way into the lead and had everyone else start targeting dogfish with sandeel and mackerel baits.

Shortly after Gary had landed his dogfish a groan was audible from John Fleming fishing on the next peg as a dogfish he was winding in dropped off!

Right along the match venue everyone began catching whiting, which varied from the small 20cm to the best of the day a nice fish for the area of 36cm caught by John Dixon. In the past 2-3 years the whiting seem to be getting bigger which is a positive sign after years of struggling to get any of size.

The dogfish tend to be caught on the pier around high water or just after, but they didn’t show in any numbers disappointingly with only another three being caught by Tony Lewthwaite, John Dixon and John Fleming. John making up for the lost one earlier.

The whiting kept being caught right up to the end of the 4 hour match and made it a very close finish at the end. It was a catch, measure and release match with only 4cm difference between the top scoring 4 anglers.

The final results after the cards were checked was:

1st place with a length of 254cm with 8 fish – John Fleming

2nd place with a length of 252cm with 9 fish – Tony Lewthwaite

Joint 3rd place with a length of 250cm with 10 fish each Joe Pattinson and Mark Armstrong

The longest fish prize was shared with a 54cm long dogfish each – John Dixon and John Fleming.

Considering the awful weather the pier proved a comfortable venue in the conditions and all anglers caught fish. However the fish had to be quick off the mark to the bait as the crabs were prolific. I was down to 7-8 minutes per cast any longer and your hooks were stripped bare!