With the aquarium ready and a neap tide, I resorted to some fishing from the quay with my humongous (>2.5 meter) net. This thing is a pain when moving/emigrating but I’m glad I’ve kept it. It is custom-made for RAVON: Reptielen Amfibien en Vissen Onderzoek Nederland (Reptiles Amphibians and Fish Research The Netherlands), a great club that I joined for a while when living in Holland. (The ‘fish’ in the acronym covers only the species living or migrating in fresh water). The net can be bought via the RAVON web shop; at the time they also sold a handy cuvet:
I have scraped along the sides of the main quay in Flushing a number of times now (btw, the quay was built by the Dutch; Flushing is named after Vlissingen in Zeeland, the old Cornish name of the village is Nankersey). Two-spot gobies (the most common semi-benthic species), a rock goby and even a Fifteen-spined stickleback Spinachia spinachia have ended up in the net. The last species I did not keep, as they prefer live food that I cannot offer them, but I took it home for a quick pic:
I never caught young mullet, a species that is great for the aquarium, which is strange as they are common around water fronts. This weekend to my surprise I caught two wrasse for the aquarium: a Rock cook Centrolabus exoletus and a Corkwing wrasse Symphodus melops. Two very beautiful little fish (both species grow up to 15 cm, these were around 5 cm). Here the Rock cook Corkwing wrasse that looked superficially like a Rock cook but back home in the aquarium showed its distinctive spot on the base of the tailfin (best way to identify is counting scales and rays but that is almost impossible now; useful info on wrasse determination on this angling site):
An Bollenessor 
Nice one, that net is some job! Really difficult to find something as sturdy as that AND with a fine mesh suitable for the tiny little things us rockpoolers are after. I think thats on my wishlist now 😉 How did you identify that this one is a Rock Cook? Never seen one myself, is it just because the black dot on the tail is missing? I think I would have misidentified it for a corkwing just because they look so similar 😉
Hi Marius, I have corrected the post: it is indeed not a Rock cook! The dot at the base of the tail was missing when I caught it and instead it had the dark banding by the tail that a Rock cook has. The colouration overall was much more like a Rock cook than a Corkwing looking at the pictures in my Collins guide, but this is of course not a a very good way of determining species!