Turbot

If the plaice is the people's flatfish, the turbot is the connoisseur's. Nearly circular, thick through the shoulder and freckled with bony tubercles instead of scales, a turbot is an ambush predator that buries itself on sandbanks and engulfs whole sandeels in a single lunge.

The famous English Channel banks - the Shambles off Portland, the Skerries off Dartmouth - are the classic grounds. Sport is a drifting game: long traces, a slither of fresh mackerel or a whole sandeel bouncing down the tide, and a take that starts as dead weight before the fish wakes up.

Turbot are not abundant and never were, which is partly why a good one is such an event - and why they command the prices they do. A double-figure fish from a drifting charter boat is one of British sea angling's genuine red-letter days.