One summer, many years ago, while fishing alone on Mumbles pier, I cast my bait out on two Daiwa Sandstorm bass rods just as the neap tide reached bottom water. Apart from a couple of dogfish, which I caught during the first two hours of the flooding tide, my efforts were fruitless. An hour after low water I was joined by an elderly angler who set up just one rod with a single 1/0 hook attached to a 12-inch-long flowing snood sitting just above a 1oz tear-drop sinker. He then promptly sat on one of the available benches and did nothing. Two hours later he was still sitting there – doing nothing. Intrigued by his long spell of inactivity, I casually asked him if he was going to do any fishing. He looked at his watch and said, “I’ll give it another five minutes.” True to his word, he baited his single hook with one king ragworm and dropped it between the pier stanchion supports. During the next two hours he caught red mullet, grey mullet, trigger fish, bass, dogfish, black bream, pollack, dragonet, corkwing wrasse, pouting and a three-bearded rockling, all with king ragworm bait. Two hours after he started fishing (an hour before top water) he stopped,
