AUGUST 119 



The vessel chosen for our excursion was a 16ft. 

 sailing boat, eminently suitable for the inside grounds in 

 the channel of the Conway, but hardly weatherly 

 enough for fishing off the Great Orme, except in light 

 breezes with no ground swell moving. The position of 

 the Great Orme's Head, as will be remembered, is at 

 the entrance of the Menai Straits, and this headland 

 forms the termination of the peninsula formed by the 

 estuary of the Conway and that portion of the Irish Sea 

 known as Llandudno Bay, upon which the fashionable 

 watering-place of that name is situated. The fishing off 

 the Head is fair as summer fishing goes, the water 

 deep, and the bottom covered with great masses of 

 boulder, which time and the action of wind and sea have 

 broken off from the precipitous sides of the great rocky 

 point. An hour's sail took us to our fishing ground, the 

 principal mark for which is the lighthouse, the western 

 gable of which is just opened on the projecting rocky 

 promontory. Here the water is deep (about ten 

 fathoms), and a nasty cross sea is set up with almost 

 any wind. We sailed down with the last of the ebb, 

 and arrived just as the tide was again making. The 

 bait had been collected by the boy on the rough ground 

 just below the town of Conway, and consisted of large 

 mussels (of which a pailful is easily gathered at low 

 water) and soft crab found under stones and bunches of 

 weeds. The boatman also told us that on a certain bank 

 large quantities of sand eels could be got by digging, 

 but unfortunately the natives do not possess the art of 

 keeping them alive for bait. On some future occasion 

 the writer intends taking his courge (the Channel Island 

 sand-eel basket), in which these fish may be kept alive 

 for a day or two, as bass abound in the estuary, and no 

 doubt could be taken with sand-eel and drift-line, or even 

 fishing off the rocks. 



Having got on our marks, we anchored by 

 means of a weight, or killick, as it is called in the 

 south, and fished with short boom and streamer 

 (West Country fashion), baiting with mussel on two 

 hooks and soft crab on the tail hook. The local man 



