Swanage day 3: Sunday

Well, it's late so I'll keep this brief - Sunday usually involves going for a healthy walk somewhere before segue-ing into a slightly more leisurely and less poisonous pub excursion than on the previous day.

So we set out along the coast path westwards past Dancing Ledge to Winspit, where Andy and Robin got their tackle out. Fishing tackle, that is. We'd forgotten to bring any bait so we had to hunt around for some limpets, and luckily we found a couple of whoppers - a bit of frenzied gouging and slicing later and we were sorted for bait.

Frankly I was somewhat sceptical about the likelihood of catching anything, apart from maybe pneumonia, but after a long fruitless (and indeed fishless) start we caught three medium-sized wrasse within the space of about ten minutes.

I'd never been directly involved in the transition from live wriggling fish to beautifully prepared Filet-O-Wrasse before, but actually it's quite simple, as long as you're not at all squeamish. Just give it a quick bash on the back of the neck with a heavy rock. slit it open, scoop all the internal goop out into a convenient rock pool (on no account fill your Thermos from this pool afterwards) and then cut its head off. My Dartmoor knife was ideal for this sort of work. For larger specimens like, say, tuna, or whale sharks, I might have to deploy the axe instead.

Internet opinion seems divided to say the least on the edibility of wrasse, but we chucked them on the barbecue with a couple of slices of lemon from the corner shop and a sprig of rosemary harvested from someone's garden hedge on the way home, and it was really quite nice. I reckon the cat piss on the rosemary cancelled out the raw sewage in the fish.

Anyway, the full series of pictures from the weekend is now up on the gallery, as are some photos from a trip to Reading last weekend. Most of these are from a walk round the Warburg Nature Reserve - Doug has more info over at Blue-Grey.