Some big Isles of Scilly mullet

• My mate Del rang me up from the Isles of Scilly this morning to give me an update on his recent mullet fishing exploits - and the old boy's been been doing pretty good !! Mullet to 7lbs last week, and a nice fish of just over 6lbs this morning, before the winds swung around on him and killed it for a while. That is some outstanding fishing, yet so few anglers have any idea that the Isles of Scilly produces some awesome mullet when the conditions are right. It is coming up now for their best time of year on the mullet and I am hoping to get over if time and weather allow, sometime over the next couple of months.

• Below you can see Del bringing a nice mullet to the net from a filming trip we did over there some time ago now - there are few places I have been on this earth that are as pretty and unspoilt as the Isles of Scilly. Del and his mate have got all the mullet fishing you could hope for to themselves. How about the outrageous shore fishing for pollack as well ? One of my all time favourite species off the shore, and one of my favourite places ever. You can't go there and not fall in love with the place. If you are lucky enough, it will be Del and his taxi that picks you up from the airport - he runs Island Taxis. Del is always really helpful towards visiting fishermen, especially if the bribe involves good quality mullet hooks.

• Not that we get excited when we are out fishing or anything. Below you can see Del frantically making hand signals to me about some rather large mullet he was seeing - fishermen never exaggerate !! I remember filming this particular episode in fact, and we saw some cracking mullet swimming around, but the crew kept spooking them because they needed to be around us all the time. I had to ask them to hang back and let Del and I do our stuff, and as far as I can remember, we got a mullet or two for the camera. I might have got somewhat overexcited as well - mullet tend to do that to me. Proper fish.

• One of these days the phone is going to go with Del telling me about a double figure mullet he has just caught - it is going to happen. An old friend of his had one of just under 10lbs a few winters ago, and Del has had a proper double in his net before, only for the net to break and the fish get away (you need a bigger and newer net). I remember that particular phone call being more of a counselling session than anything else !! He is seeing some huge fish at the moment, often just out of range, but the fish will make a mistake soon enough. Del told me his mate got smashed to pieces by a seriously proper fish last week on those big tides.

• Seems to me that a lot of fishing is really beginning to pick up at the moment, especially on the bass and mullet front - the extreme amount of rain we had in August has to have had a far greater effect than we tended to think. My mate Andy had a couple of nice bass on Sunday morning on the Cornish coastline, including a fish just under 5lbs and a tidy one that came off, all on lures. I would have been out with him normally, but I had my in-laws staying with us for the weekend and I wanted to be around. They are very cool people. But I knew that Andy would catch bass - the tides and conditions were about as spot on as I can remember all year.