A Look Back… May In Cornwall – Mackerel Season!

As winter breaks in Cornwall and the sun starts rising earlier, you’ll see the small boat fishing fleet of Cornwall steaming out before sunrise every morning.

They hunting mackerel.

I had the privilege to fish commercially for mackerel out of Mousehole for a season. It was hard work but some of the most rewarding hours I’ve spent at sea. The feeling of a hand line filled with 15+ mackerel as you pull it up and it’s just “silver” coming over the gunwale, it’s exhilarating…. you yank that tiller over hard as you circle on top of the shoal and fish till they move off or stop biting. There are fish everywhere in the boat. As you “flick” them off the hooks as they come up. There are literately mackerel flying around the boat, and sometimes…right back out! (well.. they where flying about when I was fishing….the idea was you’d flick them straight into the fish box….I was never that good…there where mackerel everywhere!) When you into a thick shoal it is absolutely brilliant !   An experienced fisherman is probably fishing with around 30 hooks on a hand line. He will heave up and clear that line in several long pull and flicks (the fish have soft mouths so the flick gets them of the hooks and into the boat). They’ll then drop the line back into the shoal. All in less than a minute, probably 30-40 seconds depending on how deep the shoal is! They’ll repeat that till the shoal moves on or stops biting.

You got about three months of good fishing on the mackerel. They generally will only feed at sunrise and sunset. So you go out twice a day and fish hard for those three months. You get up early, you steaming out around 4:30am (in summer) so up before 4. Make a flask of hot coffee and a bite to eat. It’s cold still! Then you head down to the harbour while it’s still dark. The idea being that you fishing at first light.

I used to fish most days with my mate Stretch. He was an experienced fisherman and I would follow his lead to try find the fish. He knew all the hot spots and if there was fish about he’d find them.  Stretch also taught me how to tie my lines which you tie up yourself. You fish with a hand line that has between 10 and 30 hooks on depending on your experience. More hooks are better, but harder to control. The worst thing that can happen is when the fish are biting and you get into a “frap up”. Your line gets tangled. I had a lot of those… You need to get a new line out as soon as possible or you loose the fish before they move off. But you learn and you get better each time.

So Stretch and I would steam out through the gaps before sunrise. As you steaming out to the first spot you going to try, you get your lines ready and then you crack open your flask of coffee. At about this time it’s getting light and you sitting there watching the sunrise over one of the must beautiful locations in the world. What an experience. Then it’s time to start fishing!

Our best catch of that season was just under 500kg of fish in one morning between the “Hawk” (Stretch) and the “Aquila” (me). We hit a couple of big shoals and by the time they stopped biting we had landed over 200kg’s each. That’s some morning’s fishing and I felt that day that I truly was a Cornish fisherman.

It was not long after that when one evening in the local pub “Cod”, a real salty old sea dog and widely considered to the best small boat fisherman in the area, said to me over a pint:

“You. I seen you out there. You doing al’right you are.”

Proudest moment of this Cornish fisherman’s life.

This post is part of my “A look back” series where I remember some of my experiences in different places at a similar time in the year. Read more of them here.