St Mary's Harbour and quay
Harbour wall · Salt water · in The Isles of Scilly
The archipelago's working harbour at Hugh Town, and the one piece of Scilly fishing that needs no scramble over granite and no tide table read twice. The quay is the islands' transport hub — the mainland ferry and the inter-island boats work off it — so this is fishing around vessel movements rather than in isolation. The ground is harbour bottom and quay wall: mixed, sheltered, and shallower than anything on the open coast, with the archipelago's clear water making it a mark where fish can generally be seen before they are fished for.
Safety: cliffs and rock platforms — can cause serious injury or death. One more point applies here.
FishingHQ describes what this place is, not whether you may fish it. Access, permits and who to ask.
What you can catch here
Documented at this place, grouped by how you would be fishing, with how strongly the sources support each one. This is what has been written down, not a forecast, and being listed is never permission to fish.
From the shore · 3
What these strengths mean
- Regular local target
- Fishing sources describe this as a normal local target here, not merely as caught.
- Recorded here
- At least one credible public account of this species being caught here. That is all it means.
- How breadth is counted
- A fish documented at six marks is shown as six marks: breadth never raises the strength on its own. A fishery account describes the fishing; a recorded catch reports one specific catch. How evidence is weighed.
Also associated with this ground
Recorded as present here without a documented method or strength behind them.
Atlantic horse mackerel · Thick-lipped grey mullet · Garfish
How people fish it
Practised here: Sea fishing.
Methods the sources name for this ground. Each one is explained in full on its own page.
- Float fishing
Suspending a bait at a controlled depth beneath a buoyant indicator — the most visual, most controllable and most widely applicable method in angling.
- Light rock fishing
Ultralight lure fishing from the shore with tackle rated in single grams — a discipline that catches the fish everybody else steps over, and one FishingHQ held every component of and had never named.
- Feathering and multi-lure traces
A string of small lures on droppers, worked in the water column — how most people in Britain and Ireland catch their first sea fish, and the method most likely to catch far more than anybody intended.
The ground and the water
- The ground
- The archipelago's working harbour at Hugh Town, and the one piece of Scilly fishing that needs no scramble over granite and no tide table read twice. The quay is the islands' transport hub — the mainland ferry and the inter-island boats work off it — so this is fishing around vessel movements rather than in isolation. The ground is harbour bottom and quay wall: mixed, sheltered, and shallower than anything on the open coast, with the archipelago's clear water making it a mark where fish can generally be seen before they are fished for.
- Exposure
- Sheltered, and the most sheltered fishing in the archipelago. It is the mark that remains fishable when the Atlantic is running and the headlands are not.
- Depth
- Shallow harbour ground, in water clear enough to see the bottom over much of it.
- Tide and flow
- The full archipelago range against a wall, so the drop below the stance changes greatly through a tide.
Through the year
A summer mark in practice: mackerel and the scad and garfish that come with them are what the harbour is fished for, and they are a warm-months fishery.
Safety
Cliffs and rock platforms — Can cause serious injury or death
Long-period Atlantic ground swell reaches exposed granite ledges with no shelf to bleed its energy and independently of local wind, arriving in sets. The rock is rounded, weeded and drops into deep water, so a person swept off has no shallow margin and little to grip.
What reduces it: Read the swell forecast including the period rather than the wind forecast, watch a mark through several full set cycles from above the wet line, choose a position with a way up behind it, wear a buoyancy aid, and do not fish exposed ledges alone.
Worse when:
- With Atlantic ground swell running under calm bright conditions, which is the combination that misleads visitors.
- At the outer points and the western ground, where there is no shelter of any kind.
Boat safety — Can cause serious injury or death
The shallow granite platform between and around the islands is strewn with unmarked rock, drying ledge and reef, invisible in a ripple. Tidal streams between the islands run strongly and produce overfalls over shallow ground.
What reduces it: Keep to known passages, go slowly on unfamiliar water, obtain local knowledge of the ground and the streams before travelling at speed, and plan passages around the state of the tide.
Rules and access
FishingHQ does not know the current access position here. Shore angling in England is not rod-licensed, but access rights, landowner permission, local authority and harbour byelaws, national and inshore fisheries measures, and site designations all apply and all change. Check the current position with the relevant inshore fisheries and conservation authority, the harbour or local authority, and the landowner before going.
Particular to this water: A working harbour and the islands' transport hub, operated by St Mary's Harbour Authority. Fishing here is subject to whatever the harbour authority permits around vessel movements, and that is a question for the harbour rather than for this page. The Isles of Scilly IFCA — not Cornwall IFCA — makes the inshore fisheries byelaws for the archipelago. Nothing here states that this quay may be fished.
Who holds the answer:
- The Inshore Fisheries and Conservation Authority for the district, which makes and enforces inshore byelaws.
- The Marine Management Organisation, for national recreational sea fishing measures in English waters.
- The local authority and, where one exists, the harbour authority, for access, byelaws and shellfish classification.
- The Isles of Scilly Inshore Fisheries and Conservation Authority, which makes and enforces inshore byelaws for these waters.
- Natural England and the site management bodies, where a marine or coastal designation affects anchoring, access, collection or disturbance.
- The Duchy of Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly Wildlife Trust, as landowner and manager for much of the land and shore.
- The harbour authority, for navigation, moorings and access.
- The local authority and the Food Standards Agency framework, for shellfish harvesting area classification.
- St Mary's Harbour Authority, which operates the quay and decides what may happen on it
- The Isles of Scilly Inshore Fisheries and Conservation Authority, which makes and enforces the inshore fisheries byelaws for the archipelago and is a separate body from Cornwall IFCA
- The Council of the Isles of Scilly, which administers the authority and the islands' land
Nearby fishing
Other publicly documented places within about 40 km, by distance. Positions are approximate public geography and are never exact marks.
- Old Town Bay — under 2 km · Bay
- Peninnis Head — under 2 km · Headland
- The Daymark, St Martin's — 5–10 km · Headland
Sources for this place
- JNCC species and habitat conservation advice — Joint Nature Conservation Committee (Conservation authority)Relied on for: Description, designation and habitat characterisation of the named coastal and marine features of the United Kingdom, and the species characteristically associated with them.States this directlyCitation checked — the work exists and is described correctly
- Cefas science, advice and data on marine and freshwater environments — Centre for Environment, Fisheries and Aquaculture Science (Government fisheries body)Relied on for: Marine environmental science for UK shelf seas: sediment characterisation, estuarine process, shellfish bed distribution, tidal range and the monitoring that describes them.States this directlyCitation checked — the work exists and is described correctly
- Sea Angler — Bauer Media (Specialist angling publication)Relied on for: Long-running published description of British sea angling practice by region, ground type and named mark.FishingHQ's interpretation of what it saysCitation checked — the work exists and is described correctly
- General angling website restatements of established technique — Various (Credible secondary source)Relied on for: Widely restated public descriptions of which places are conventionally fished and how, recorded as practitioner consensus rather than as scholarship, and not relied on for access, permission or any current rule.Background and mechanism onlyCitation checked — the work exists and is described correctly
How FishingHQ labels evidence is explained in the evidence policy. Last reviewed 2026-08-16.