Web site by: J Bailey               Copyright © 2008 Riviera Fishing Products - Gurdy-fish-stripper.com             Updated: 07 August 08

Trolling for fish – particularly mackerel – is also vital down here. Gone are the winter days when you could just steam out from the land, find a shoal, turn broadside to the wind or raise the mizzen and wind away with a traditional gurdy/outrigger/fish-stripper arrangement (although, you can use the new gear for that type of operation).

Our hand line-caught mackerel is now largely a summer fishery, where the true hand liners at St Ives and Newlyn make the looping method look like a work of art, although it is alien to our lads here in Falmouth Bay and beyond.

But in both ‘looping’ and using whatever type of traditional gurdy gear you have, trolling slowly until you hit the fish is essential. The secret then is to go hard over with the tiller to “keep-on” the fish as the only way to keep the day’s profit at a reasonable level.

I use a traditional gurdy system and once hard over, in theory, the line should stay on the outward roller but much of the time it does not.

It’s OK if you have someone else on the tiller (or secondary controls at hand on a bigger boat) to keep the line on the roller by varying the diameter of the circle you are travelling on, but single handed that’s often not possible and the blessed line flips off the roller’s end and you lose valuable time.

And, when you get it right, the diameter of the incoming roller isn’t large enough to prevent some of the larger fish from flipping off.

“I can’t do anything about that” may be your first thought, but hang on – here in Cornwall, Devon, Dorset and further east, one large mackerel often means £1! You can’t afford that loss.

Product Review

Extract taken from: Fishing News - Inshore Corner  01 August 2008   by Phil Lockley

Having given a lot of space in this column to line fishing, I was hesitant at featuring a new gurdy/stripper/outrigger system until I saw the Riviera Gurdy-Fish-Stripper, designed by Torquay inshore fisherman Clive Baker and made by the South West firm, Riviera Fishing Products.

Clive phoned me and told me how a large part of his yearly income depends on summer line fishing, mostly for mackerel and/or squid, and that, like me, he cannot master the ‘loop’ system used in authentic mackerel hand line fishing.

A plan for him to bring the gear, bolt it onto my boat and try it out was agreed. I saw the recent FN review by David Linkie (11 July) on the new 8.1m Peterhead Trefjar boat Darcie Girl, and on seeing the pictures thought that something like that for smaller boats may be the answer. What a superbly rigged boat she is.

Above: Clive Baker displays the design of the Riviera Fish Stripper System.

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