A load of bass around, could see them busting on bait, they took some working out though

Dave and I had a fantastic session at the end of last week on the open coast, but on a mark that we know fairly well, there wasn’t actually that much which unfolded like we might have expected it to with the perfect tides and conditions. You know when you get to know a mark and you tend to find that specific little areas tend to fish well on certain types of lures at specific stages of the tide and so on? Well apart from catching a few bass as we’d expect/hope to when we first got there, not much went to script for the rest of the session. But it ended up being a bit of a blinder of a bass fishing session…………

As and when the mark is fishing, for some reason I seem to lose the bass for a while and then find them again when I can access specific bits of water. But it simply wasn’t happening, and I wondered if the fish we had caught earlier might be it for the tide. I could hardly complain with the fish we had caught earlier, but I also just didn’t accept that any bass which had been around had suddenly done a proper runner. Not when the conditions were so good and we had the shape of waves we wanted and so on. Nope, the fish were somewhere, and it was up to us to find them.

A little while later I suddenly saw a few fish tails flipping out of some white water and naturally assumed it was mullet. I didn’t radio Dave for that very reason, but a few minutes later I then saw a lot of tails and whole fish flipping out of the white water - and it definitely wasn’t mullet! I can’t remember the last time I saw bass feeding like this, and with where they were it looked like the fish had corralled a bunch of bait into an area of fizzing white water. I got on the radio to Dave and told him what I was seeing. We could get a lure out to where the busting bass were, but whatever we began to offer to the fish was not being smashed.

I changed over from my larger 13cm/33g Savage Gear Sandeel V2 Weedless and clipped on the Savage Gear Sandeel Pencil 125 in the sandeel colour. I knew it was fairly shallow where the bass were doing their thing on the bait because I kept smashing into submerged rocks with the Sandeel V2 Weedless. My thinking was that the reason they weren’t smashing our lures was perhaps because the bass were dialled in a smaller bait species. I know the Sandeel Pencil 125 is not a seriously small lure length wise, but it’s a narrower profile and to my eyes doesn’t look “big” in the water. A few casts later, once I had worked out how to get the lure in amongst the feeding bass with the angle of the wind and a lot of rocks, I hooked up and landed a bass. I kept casting the Sandeel Pencil 125 but got no more fish, so I changed down to the smaller Sandeel Pencil 90 but still caught no more.

I then thought about a slower, slightly more subtle approach where I could hold a lure a bit longer in that fizzy water, so I changed tack and rigged up a 6’’ OSP DoLive Stick on one of the 6/0 Savage Gear weedless corkscrew hooks (no belly-weight, just how I like the 6’’ DoLive Stick if the conditions allow). Because this soft plastic casts so well I was still able to get the lure to the bass which we continued to see busting out of the water on bait, but things didn’t change. I was getting a few plucks and bangs on the lure, but the fish were not committing, and I like to think I was fishing the 6’’ DoLive Stick okay.

It was Dave who went through his rucksack full of tricks and came up with the solution. All credit to the bloke, and although it might not sound like much of a difference at all, once he switched over to the slightly smaller 4.5’’ size OSP DoLive Stick, he was into more bass straight away. Were the bass quite simply so dialled in on a specific bait source/size that they weren’t interested in anything that wasn’t similar to it? I have a lot of good history with the regular 6’’ size DoLive Stick, and I guess that because it’s done so well for me over the years I haven’t given the smaller 4.5’’ size that much time.

I wasn’t carrying any with me but Dave was kind enough to sort me out with a lure and a rather interesting size 4/0 BKK Armor-Point Permalock Weighted weedless hook. We are not competing with each other and to be honest I don’t want to fish with anglers who might fish like that anyway. What you can’t see in the photo above is the insert weight in the front of the soft plastic, as per the photo below. Really clever, and it was definitely helping the smaller and lighter 4.5’’ DoLive Stick get out there and grip in/fish effectively in the relatively bouncy conditions.

We both caught a few more bass but then lost the fish again as the bait obviously moved or perhaps got literally wiped out by the rather hungry bass, so we put our heads together and decided to move a bit and see if we could find the fish again. Which we did, and then we smashed ‘em. Plenty of bass busting on bait again. I love all kinds of lure fishing for bass and I fully expect to be obsessing about yet another way to catch them in a totally different environment at some point, but there is something I love so much about fishing soft plastics in bouncy open coast conditions and getting that “tap, bang” on the rod tip. I know a surface lure take is incredible, but that feeling you get down the braid, into the rod, and down into your arms when a bass smashes a lure which you are deliberately twitching around does it for me every single time. One of the last bass landed before we had to get out of there with a rapidly flooding tide was a cracking 65cms fish for Dave in the photo below. Talk about bouncing. Bouncing conditions, bouncing braid, and bouncing bank balance as I buy yet more gear which I didn’t know I needed!

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