Summer Mackerel Fishing

One of the best things about high summer is the annual visit to our shores of shoals of mackerel. Fishing for mackerel is just so much fun - you can fish them from a kayak, a boat or even just from a pier, bridge or breakwater.

Piers, bridges and breakwaters offer easy access to deep water, and are a good place to start learning how to fish.

There is no such thing as a specialist pier rod, you can use any old rod - buy a cheap one from a market stall or village store to get you started. For mackerel you will also need some feathers and a weight - take a few extra in case they get jammed on the seabed. This, by the way, is known as your ‘rig’.

Roryj Jackson's clever rig made from just a piece of wood and some nylon rope. You can stab the hooks into the wood to make them safer to carr

The hardest thing to master when you first start fishing is the knot. If you know how to do a bowline, this is a useful knot, otherwise the basic fisherman's knot is to go through your hoop, wind the line back five times around and then loop back through the first turn. Another option is to buy the little attaching hooks and swivels that are sold where you will have bought your rig.

Go an hour before high tide and you have a couple of hours glorious fishing ahead of you.

Mackerel swim on our near the surface, but they dip up and down, so keep your feathers moving up and down at all levels, letting them sink and rise by manipulating the line.

On a boat or kayak you can usually spot mackerel by the bird life above them. The birds are probably chasing the same shoals of small fish as the mackerel. Kayaker Jim Kennedy also advises fishing in the lee of an island wind or tide, where fish food collects in the eddy and the mackerel seek it.

The best thing about mackerel, which is to the fisherman’s advantage, is that they hunt in large groups, and so are anxious to be first to grab the food and just lunge for whatever is ahead of them, without stopping for more cautious investigation. So if your feather is there and there are fish underneath it, chances are a number of them will go for it.

When fishing from a pier, or from a boat, choose a bait of five feathers. But on a kayak go for only one or two. You don’t want seven mackerel flapping around on your deck, do you, however good they taste.

The easiest, fastest and most humane way to dispatch a mackerel, when you have caught it, is to put your thumb in its mouth and bend the head forward until it snaps. Instant death. You can also hit it over the head with a piece of metal kept in your bag for that very purpose, and on a kayak whacking it against your paddle shaft is as good a way as any, remembering that it would do the same to you if your positions were reversed.

Best bring a bag, or you can use a nifty way of tying them with an old piece of rope, which is a tip taught to me by Roryj Jackson. This is an especially useful tip (you need to have killed them with the thumb method, which gives you something to tie on).

And, let’s admit it, we always forget to bring the bag. Or maybe something inside us says if we go prepared with a bag, that's tempting fate, and we aren’t going to catch anything.

So, tight lines!!