As in last year I managed to spend almost a month back home in Greece! I went along with my girlfriend at the end of December and returned yesterday night. Similarly to last year my fishing time was greatly overestimated (girlfriend and too many friends and relatives 😁) but the variety of species was pretty good.
First off I had some LRF sessions in the local harbours and rockmarks of N. Iraklitsa, N. Peramos and Kavala. The weather was fantastic for the duration of my stay, in stark contrast with the polar-like conditions of the year before...
I was surprised to find many 'summer' species still around and large shoals of baitfish close in.
Unfortunately on my flight to Greece, my LRF case was stolen (!) and I had only very basic gear left... Thankfully that included a small bag of cheburashkas and some jigheads. I had some soft plastics and of course Isome and Gulp sanworms, with the latter proving the most successful bait...
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| A good fighter on the LRF... |
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| Beautiful striped seabream |
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| Weevers over sandy bottom... |
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| Hungry goby. |
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| The ubiquitous painted comber! |
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| like a mirror... |
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| This winter weather was fantastic! |
While LRFing over a rocky point I noticed baitfish shoals moving about and fishing boats close to shore trolling. I wasn't sure what they were fishing for and started casting some metals on the heavier gear I had with me... I then decided to put on a topwater and picked a Lucky Craft Gunfish 95 as dusk was approaching. After a few casts I started seeing splashes and hits on the topwater from multiple fish and with a few more casts and missed strikes I managed to connect with a fish! It jumped a couple times but was soon brought on the rocks and it was a small bluefish!
Been a long while since I caught one of them and was gutted that the Gopro had no battery!
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| Baby bluefish were close in. |
My next fishing outings took place in Southern Greece at the lovely town of Ermioni with my fishing buddy Stelios. We chose Ermioni as it offers a good variety of targets and also because my friend's contacts reported meagre results in Poros (our first choice).
We mainly night fished and concentrated on squid and cuttlefish and also false scad.
The mollusks were more forthcoming and again it was a while since I had done any 'eging' to target them. Thankfully Stelios had an endless variety of squid-jigs and we had a lot to play with!
Most of the squid were small but my friend got one of over 800g while I got half kilo one as my largest. Moreover I managed to catch my smallest ever mollusk, a tiny musky octopus (μοσχιός)! Some cuttlefish and an octopus raised the species count for mollusks to 4...
Later in the night it was time for scad and we used 6-10g darting and Gamakatsu range swimmer jigheads with 3" Sluggos and Tiny Xlayers. The fish were not tightly grouped (possibly as there wasn't much fry in the harbour) and after covering the area with the softplastics we thought to try small metals to try deeper. Metals are not a lure I tend to use much at night but for such aggressive fish they can actually be very effective, especially if they have some 'fluo' on them. The only drawback to the metals was that they came with too small a treble and I had no assist hooks with me. This in combination with my rod having a stiff tip meant that I lost a couple fish.
It was interesting to note the size of these false scad with all of them being descent fish...
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| Squidlet... |
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| Cuttlefish... |
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| A tiny musk octopus! |
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| Octopus.. |
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| Plenty of them around.. |
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| Lovely colour.. |
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| They put up a good scrap when bigger.. |
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| False scad. |
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| Predators of the night.. |
At dawn we would move at a nearby rocky point and target barracudas with jerkbaits. A pattern that seems to get results very often as the cudas target passing fish high up in the water column at that time. To be honest the results weren't that good and I only managed to get a couple small fish but they're such a cool fish even small!
After the sunrise I fished softplastics and metals near the bottom and this resulted in a few small golden groupers.
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| Cuda at dawn on Duo Tide Minnow Slim. |
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| A small cuda.. |
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| Love groupers! |
On our way back from Ermioni we got a text from Stelio's friend in Poros only to find out that he went and smashed the barracudas there! We cant be lucky all the time...
After my return from Athens I started targeting some local harbours and coastal lagoons for bass but unfortunately just when I started finding the fish my time was up!
Used 3"-4" slim paddletails on 10-14g jigheads on medium fast retrieves near sundown for them and would switch to 4" soft jerkbaits on the same jigheads but worked near the bottom when it got dark. Successful lures were 4" Pontoon 21 Attira, 4" Reins Rockvibe shad and Megabass Xlayer.
The presence of bait was always necessary for the bass to be in numbers in the harbour...
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| Local bass from the lagoons.. |
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| ...and from the harbour. |
Well that was it for my fishing adventures in Greece and I'm now back in Scotland!
Time to see how them pollock are doing...
Tight Lines and best wishes for a productive season!
Gear used.
Rod: Gamakatsu Akilas mobile 80MH, Snowbee Kuroshio 4pc travel LRF rod (05g-7g)
Reel: Shimano Stradic Ci4 2500f, Shimano Stradic 1000fc
Mainline:
YGK P.E Line Frontier WX8 Shore Casting Line 150m P.E 0.8 , 14lb, Duel Hardcore x4 PE0.6
Leader: Daiwa Tournament FC fluorocarbon 18lbs, Toray Excellent fluorocarbon 6.8lbs
Lures: various
