bacon
Well-known member
Hi all, been a bit absent from sea fishing recently.
Back in summer 2019 I started getting skin reactions to bait, specifically Ragworm and squid, I never wore gloves, to be fair I also never cleaned them, just wiped them on a towel. To my detriment it seems!
But while out sole fishing with my ole mate Earwigsoup, my hands started getting very very itchy and uncomfortable, this led to immediate skin cracking and oozing, nice right! Ever since my hands now react to everything, most noticeably anything acidic (lemons etc during cooking), but also sea baits.
I started wearing nitrile gloves, but found that while the gloves protected me from the bait, the sweat in the glove also irritated my hands so it was a lose lose eventually, I started using cotton liners, which helped keep it at bay a little longer, but found that I need to constantly refresh the liners to keep them dry.
This was becoming a nightmare, my favourite hobby and I could not enjoy it due to my hands blowing up on every trip. The itchiness, cracking, oozing, red rash, pain/discomfort etc would last for weeks, with any small provocation it would go full blown again.
Docs diagnosed the condition as a form of Eczema, Pompholyx to be exact. No known solutions other than manage it the best you can. Some steroid creams which I haven't found works very well, or at all.
So where am I now? Well naturally I cannot stop fishing, so I have slowly reduced how much sea fishing I do with bait, I have been mixing it up with a lot of freshwater stuff, fly fishing (terribly) in the Bristol waters (Chew, Blagdon), coarse fishing my local rivers, lure fishing for Pike and Perch in the local rivers and Gloucester Canal, even visited a local commercial with my friend a few times recently trying to catch match carp, tench etc.
What I have found is that my giving my hands a break from gloves/irritating baits, they have recovered some what, rarely get a bad reaction any more, I am able to enjoy fishing, albeit not my beloved sea fishing as often as I would like. I still go lure fishing in salt water when I can, but that is limited here in the upper BC.
I did manage to get out on Saturday and bagged myself a couple of doggies around Clevedon, donj't get too manyt his far up!....Good to be back out, last proper bait session was last October, but I was taking gloves off after every bait, so they can avoid getting sweaty, changing liners when they no longer felt dry etc. best of all, no reactions! I will start to go sea fishing more often again now, I will just have to rein it in if my hands blow up at any point.
There wasn't any particular point to this post, other than to say hello, I will hopefully have some fish to post in the catch reports soon enough once we start sole fishing again.
Cheers all
Mike
Back in summer 2019 I started getting skin reactions to bait, specifically Ragworm and squid, I never wore gloves, to be fair I also never cleaned them, just wiped them on a towel. To my detriment it seems!
But while out sole fishing with my ole mate Earwigsoup, my hands started getting very very itchy and uncomfortable, this led to immediate skin cracking and oozing, nice right! Ever since my hands now react to everything, most noticeably anything acidic (lemons etc during cooking), but also sea baits.
I started wearing nitrile gloves, but found that while the gloves protected me from the bait, the sweat in the glove also irritated my hands so it was a lose lose eventually, I started using cotton liners, which helped keep it at bay a little longer, but found that I need to constantly refresh the liners to keep them dry.
This was becoming a nightmare, my favourite hobby and I could not enjoy it due to my hands blowing up on every trip. The itchiness, cracking, oozing, red rash, pain/discomfort etc would last for weeks, with any small provocation it would go full blown again.
Docs diagnosed the condition as a form of Eczema, Pompholyx to be exact. No known solutions other than manage it the best you can. Some steroid creams which I haven't found works very well, or at all.
So where am I now? Well naturally I cannot stop fishing, so I have slowly reduced how much sea fishing I do with bait, I have been mixing it up with a lot of freshwater stuff, fly fishing (terribly) in the Bristol waters (Chew, Blagdon), coarse fishing my local rivers, lure fishing for Pike and Perch in the local rivers and Gloucester Canal, even visited a local commercial with my friend a few times recently trying to catch match carp, tench etc.
What I have found is that my giving my hands a break from gloves/irritating baits, they have recovered some what, rarely get a bad reaction any more, I am able to enjoy fishing, albeit not my beloved sea fishing as often as I would like. I still go lure fishing in salt water when I can, but that is limited here in the upper BC.
I did manage to get out on Saturday and bagged myself a couple of doggies around Clevedon, donj't get too manyt his far up!....Good to be back out, last proper bait session was last October, but I was taking gloves off after every bait, so they can avoid getting sweaty, changing liners when they no longer felt dry etc. best of all, no reactions! I will start to go sea fishing more often again now, I will just have to rein it in if my hands blow up at any point.
There wasn't any particular point to this post, other than to say hello, I will hopefully have some fish to post in the catch reports soon enough once we start sole fishing again.
Cheers all
Mike