The party crashers of Chesil Beach

Beach fishing makes me feel small and powerless; impotent, invisible. As I stood on Chesil Beach in West Bexington and looked eastwards towards Portland Bill, seeing 17 miles of pea-shingle beach and the infinite expanse of sea that hugs it, all I could think of was needles in haystacks. Many haystacks.

I’m a boat angler. I like to potter around in my boat, drifting reefs and sand bars, zooming out to offshore wrecks. I like trolling lures along miles of coast-hugging sea, covering water and scoping out the seabed. Not picking one spot in a trillion miles of coastline to park myself and cast my puny bait. But I am a boat angler currently without a boat. So if I want to angle, what do I do? “Let’s go whiting bashing on the Chesil at West Bex,” said Paul Quagliana, as if it were something