Sea Angling

About Sea Angling

This area of the web site will be developed over the next year to include everything you need to go sea fishing. For the time being, here is some basic information for the newcomer to the sport.

As an island nation, we have a long history of sea angling and millions of people have done at least some fishing in the sea. For many, this has simply involved buying a handline and some feathers and trailing them behind a small boat or off the end of a pier. There are hundreds of species of fish in the UK’s coastal waters and thousands of places to go fishing. The vast majority of the coastline is free to access and you don’t need a permit or a rod licence to go sea angling. This makes it one of the easiest ways for beginners to learn how to fish.

A note of caution however: the sea can be very dangerous and you should always seek local advice about tides and currents before going sea fishing, even from the shore. It’s always safer to fish with someone else, ideally someone who knows the local conditions.

View safety guidelines.

Many species can be caught from the shore, either off the beach or from rocky headlands, but for some fish you’ll have to go out in a boat. Charter boat trips are available and we will be listing Angling Trust members who operate these services soon. The most popular fish to catch are probably mackerel, cod, whiting, plaice, wrasse, pollack and bass, but there are hundreds of others.

There are a wide variety of methods for catching sea fish, and these could be divided into bait fishing, spinning, feathering and fly-fishing. Popular baits include crabs, sand-eels, fish, lugworms and ragworms. Baits are either suspended under a float or held on the bottom of the sea using heavy weights. This is the best way to catch the widest variety of fish, because most fish feed by scavenging for worms, molluscs and dead fish on the sea bed. Because of the currents, tides and waves in the sea, much heavier weights (and stronger lines) are used than in freshwater fishing. Rods also tend to be thicker and stronger to cast these weights.

Having said that you can use a normal spinning rod which you might use for pike fishing to go spinning or floatfishing from the shoreline, and often you can catch fish within a few yards of the beach; you don’t necessarily have to cast a long way to catch. Bass, pollack and wrasse can be caught easily, if you find the right spot.

A very popular fish is the mackerel. You can catch these fish with a handline and a few feathers, but most are caught using a beach casting rod which can throw a heavy weight and a series of feathers more than 100 yards out to sea. These are then pulled back through the water quickly to imitate small bait fish. If there are mackerel around, you can catch large numbers.

More and more anglers are discovering salt water fly-fishing, which can be done from the shore and from sea kayaks. The lures they use are designed to look like small fish and even crabs and the light tackle makes catching mackerel, bass and pollack great fun.

Many sea fish are good to eat, but most stocks are suffering from commercial overfishing (and overfishing of their food sources), habitat damage from beam trawlers, dredging, gravel extraction and pollution. Please only take home fish which have healthy stocks, and return small fish that haven’t had a chance to breed yet carefully to the water. We will be posting information on this site about fish stocks and minimum sizes for keeping soon.

Angling Trust will be campaigning and lobbying all levels of government on your behalf to protect and restore our precious fish stocks – please support this work by joining up now – click here for more information about membership.