Bit of catching up to do

I've been busy exposing my drinking habits to a wider audience, so I thought I'd take this blog off thisisnorthdevon lest you should get fed up of my grinning mug...
Anyway, now I'm back, and I didn't let the booze diary get in the way of my fishing.
A night at Woolacombe gave me loads of bites, bait that was gradually getting gnawed away, but nothing to reel in. To be honest the tides were all wrong when I went. I'd just missed high tide and spent my evening walking ever further down the beach. Come the end it was low tide, 2am and I was utterly soaked. I'd gone out in my wellies but in my efforts to cast out a decent distance had got them waterlogged - and once your feet are wet there's little point in trying to stay dry. So I just went out to waist height and got drenched.
If I was really serious I guess I wouldn't have gone - but actually I would always prefer to spend a beautiful evening out of doors and doing something than having an early night or watching the box. Sometimes it really isn't about what you catch. Easy for me to say!
I really improved my casting over the course of the night, must have almost doubled the distance I was doing by trying some different techniques and by concentrating on how I was holding the rod. But of course it counted for nowt.
I wasn't entirely alone all evening. Just after 1am a pair of drunk teenagers came to play near me. They've got two miles of beach and where do they come? Five sodding yards away to have a little dance in the waves. One of them was of course a hoodie and, as I know them to be armed and dangerous, I kept an eye on where they were all all times in case they mugged me for my old, refrozen squid box...
The fish, however, just didn't want to come and play with me, so I finally left, damp but no more dejected than usual...

I might have known

I was mildly excited as I drove down to Westward Ho! this morning. Was my optimism not already in a pre-existing state of crushedness after months of not catching anything, I might even have been very excited. It was, after all, a beautiful morning, sunny and mild. Low tide was at 8ish. I was thinking of getting there for then, but made it by 10... needed my lie in.
So I got down there, put my new rod together, tied on one of my new lures and began casting. It took me a few casts to get used to the new rod and technique, but before long I was able to push the lure out a decent distance.
But I might as well not have bothered. Two hours I was there, and not a bleeding bite. So what am I doing wrong? Can anybody help me with some sugestions? Does anybody read this or am I simply venting my frustration to an empty worldwide web? Is there anybody out there? Please leave a comment, especially if you're any good at fishing. No reasonable offer of help refused....
A small boy joined me this morning. He didn't say much, just sat about six feet behind my right shoulder. Fortunate really that I didn't accidentally hook his glassses and hurl them out to sea while casting. Even that seemed beyond me.

'You couldn't fail to catch a fish.' Couldn't I?

'If you're really such a rubbish fisherman, then go to Bucks Mills, a few miles the other side of Bideford. You can't fail to catch a fish there, you'll be pulling out dogfish after dogfish,' or so they told me.
So I dutifully drove over there on a Thursday night when high water was due for 11.30pm. I got there for nine, and fished for three-and-a-half hours. And I didn't catch a thing. How crap is that??
I wasn't at all happy. I tried all manner of different size hooks, and switched my bait between mackerel and squid. All my bait was nicely tied on. Dare I say it was so carefully and nicely presented that there were times I felt like eating it myself. I did have a few bites (from fish, not of my bait) - it felt like something was banging the rod, rather than pulling on it. But could I get anything out of the water? Could I eckerslike.
We were having to pack up at half-twelve, as my pal had to be back in time to give his baby a night-time feed, and we saw these lights come down over the hill and down to the wall. It was a bunch of blokes. A bit random really, as this place really is in the midedle of nowhere - and suddenly there are five men in their forties and fifties...
'Caught anything?' they asked. As you do really, when you meet someone with a fishing rod on a small pebble beach in the middle of the night. I suppose I should have asked whether they had managed to successfuly burgle anybody or smuggle any drugs over the evening, but I was far to polite.
I replied in the negative.
'What, not even a smooth-hound?'
Restraining myself from suggesting he do something exotic and probably illegal with a smooth-hound, I managed to reply: 'No, not even one of them. Nothing.'
He continued: 'Oh. I don't beachcast myself, I can't cast far enough. But I got a few bass off feathers from a kayak the other day.'
Great. Even the local crooks are better at fishing than I am.