Plaice By Nick Fisher

Plaice

By Nick Fisher

‘MEN get weird about plaice’ said Pat Carlin, as he leant against the bulkhead of his charter boat, sucking on a roll-up. ‘Don’t know what it is about them. But there’s something. Something gets them all obsessed and serious.’

We’d just dropped the anchor on some rough ground, half a mile to the east of Portland Bill, and now we were stood, smoking, waiting for the boat to swing round and settle on the end of the anchor rope.

‘They come out here with all sorts of crazy rigs. Stuff with beads and bells and spoons. And God knows what else’ says Pat, his eyes carefully watching the display on his GPS navigator, gauging where the boat should settle, and how much rope to pay out. He makes a quick calculation and scribbles figures on a scrap of paper.

‘And you should see their faces when they’re getting into good fishing’ he continues. ‘They got this deep furrow across their brows and their jaws are set like this...’ Pat pulls a comicserious face. ‘Some blokes get themselves all wound-up about plaice. Sometimes you can have ten blokes on board, doing a drift, and no one says a single word.. ‘Cause they’re all concentrating, taking it so seriously.’

Pat looks at the cursor on his plotter, sucks his teeth and shakes his head. Unhappy with the position the 42 foot Aquastar has settled in. After five minutes he goes through the difficult and back-breaking procedure of hauling the anchor to start again. To get it right. This is serious stuff.

Sadly, I am not worthy to be aboard this boat, a few miles outside of Weymouth harbour on a serious quest for the compelling plaice. Because, to be absolutely honest, I don’t give a toss. Plaice are beautiful fish to look at with their rich Florida orange spots, their squinty eyes and their lily white bellies. But they don’t move me. Don’t excite me. Don’t get me muttering and salivating like a ventriloquist’s dog on a crash diet. Mainly because I don’t really enjoy eating them.

Plaice flesh is so fine and so smooth and so silky. It’s wasted on me. It’s too sophisticated. Too rare. I like muscley, thickflaked fish flesh, like bass or black bream or mackerel. My wife is the plaice freak in our family. ‘Oooh, that is just...just ...mmmm.... Heaven’ she says, sucking her fingers and licking her plate so clean it looks like it just came out the dishwasher. Me, I don’ get it. Plaice don’t speak to my palate with the same poetry as they use to serenade my missus.

At last Pat gets the boat where he wants it, anchored to the western edge of a mussel bed where these spring migrating plaice stop to gorge themselves on the small grape-sized Channel mussels. ‘There’s much bigger mussel in the harbour’ says Pat, nodding in the direction of the huge ancient wall that encircles Portland harbour. ‘These mussels never grow big because there’s too much tide out here. They don’t get long enough to feed. But plaice seem to love ‘em’

Mussels are filter-feeders, they suck in water, filter out any nourishment and then spit the water out again. But if there’s strong tides flowing for much of the day, food is scarce, because the fast-moving water disperses the food-packed sediments too quickly.

So, these mussels don’t grow big. But they must be as sweet as little honey pies, because plenty of plaice, plenty of big plaice, seek them out to succour and savour and snarf down like sweeties.

Photographer Paul Qualiana is the first man of our crew to haul a plaice on board. Which is pretty much standard practise for Paul. He’s a committed sea fisherman, full of ideas and tricks and blessed with a healthy dose of patience.

‘I don’t encourage blokes to use spoons’ says Pat, after Paul’s two pound plus plaice is safely in the net. ‘They spin too much in this fast current and usually just cause a lot of tangles. Messing all the gear up.’

Plaice spoons were traditionally made from the bowl of a dessert spoon with the handle sawn off and a hole drilled near one edge of the elliptical shape. This was then mounted a few inches back from the hook on a ring or a swivel.

The purpose of a spoon is to turn and flip in the current, or with the movement of a drift. The spoon’s antics should then attract plaice to the hook bait, by glinting or kicking-up puffs of sand. And fat fresh rag worm tipped with shreds of lightlyhooked squid, finish off the mouthwatering bait.

Plaice like a long bait’ says Pat. ‘Long, fat with lots of movement. Pat shows me his method of mounting bait on my two-hook rig, threading a ragworm up the hook, over the eye and along the line. Followed by a squid strip, then another ragworm and another squid strip. Until the bait is at least six to eight inches long. It looks marvellous, irresistible... But of course, all the other anglers on board, me included, now only have eyes for Paul’s plaice spoon.

‘I made it last night’ says Paul, showing us the decorative markings he lovingly painted onto a blank shop-bought plastic plaice spoon. Instead of congratulations and admiration, the rest of us turn our backs and start muttering things like ‘Should get out more’, ‘Get a life’ and ‘Sad git’. But of course, we’re only jealous of Paul’s kit. Like true plaice maniacs our penchant for fancy rigs and gizmos is just beginning to evolve.

I dig around in the bottom of my tackle box and find what I was looking for, an ancient plastic flounder spoon I’d bought back in Mediaeval Times and never used. The hook is rusty. Still, I fancy giving it a whirl. ‘Why not’ says Pat, suggesting I lengthen the leader and dismissing my worries about rust.

A handful of fat plaice are landed in the net at anchor and many more come in rapid succession when we start drifting across the mussel beds, when the fierceness of the tide had ebbed.

Plaice bites are tender, twitchy, teasing little affairs that leave you unsure and insecure. You don’t know whether to strike, to lift slowly, to wait or what. At first there was lots of swearing and cussing and laughing, as we each missed a succession of bites. Then, as the day wore on, we lapsed into more silence, more concentration, with more than a few serious looking faces being drawn around the boat.

‘Jesus’ I thought to myself as I looked around my motley collection of mates: two farmers, a dairy man, a builder, two software technicians, a furniture restorer and a metal worker... ‘Sweet Jesus and Mary... we’re turning into plaice nuts!’ I quickly scanned around the gathering. The shock realisation that we were reverting to being weird, silent, rig-obsessed plaice anglers was surely worthy of note. And, I would have said something to all the others, would have had a laugh about it... But, I was currently too concerned about how my spoon and coloured beads were behaving. So instead, I just stared into the water, nerves tingling, and furrowed my brow....