A night fishing session on Friday threw up a bunch of questions
On Friday morning the forecast was for the first bit of onshore conditions around here for a while, but as always with this kind of “new wind” thing, it depended on the timings and whether the sea did get up at all. I got myself ready the night before and then checked the webcam as early as you could see what was going on. It wasn’t a huge amount of sea, but it was onshore, I really liked the southerly wind direction, I liked the tides, I had to hope that the weed issues we have had for most of the year has lessened, so off I went……..
With the conditions on the beach that I found I’d have been somewhat gutted not to have at least caught a bass, and I did. There was hardly any weed around as well which was outstanding. The actual fishing wasn’t epic, but I had a bunch of smallish bass on the 30g Surf Seeker in the white colour which is rigged with the single hook because any metals that I use in surf conditions are rigged with single hooks. I am convinced that this gives me a better “hookup and stay hooked up” rate when bass tend to fight in that really thrashy way when a few waves are rolling in. I also had a couple of fish on the white 11.5cm/22g Sandeel V2 Weedless. And yes, I passionately believe that any bass in the surf is worth double with how they hit and scrap. I love it. Come on, be honest, did you have any idea how varied and interesting bass fishing could be when you started losing yourself to it?
I feel that it might be time for another quick disclaimer here. I am working with Savage Gear and I use a lot of the bass lures we have developed together. I want to use these lures I might add because I helped to develop them and they catch me fish. I also use a lot of non-Savage Gear fishing tackle which I have always talked about on here. If you don’t like the fact that I do paid product development work for Savage Gear - I work in fishing by the way! - then please either don’t read this blog or unsubscribe yourself from the blog mailing list. I have always talked about the gear I use for my fishing, and a lot of that gear is Savage Gear stuff these days. I make no apologies for this and I would not expect you to apologise for whatever work you happen to do unless you happen to be a politician or a parking warden.
As glorious as it was to be out on the beach with nobody else around, my first thought when I hooked my first bass on Friday morning was that I needed to fish the same location that night. The tides were right and the forecast was for the sea conditions to stay the same and never get remotely out of control. I reckon it was a small to mediumish bit of surf, and for night time on a sandy beach I will seriously take those conditions. I finished my Friday morning session with a few bass and then gave my mate Andy a shout to see if he was up for a dangle in the dark. I got on with some work here at home and we met up at about 9pm to give it a go. From the top of the cliffs we could tell that there was still a nice bit of sea on, so yes, I kinda walked/ran down the path to get at it.
Straight away it was apparent that there were a fair few bass around, plus they ended up being a better average size than the ones I caught during the day. I’m not sure how fishing gets much more fun than getting nailed in some very fishable surf on a beach at night, but yet again it was the questions that these fish threw up which will once again leave the longest lasting impressions……………..
My successes and failures with single hooks on diving hard lures are well documented on this blog, so why on earth does there seem to be a difference with how bass hit lures in the surf as opposed to say an estuary or over a shallow reef? Does the turbulence of the surf cause the bass to have to do things differently, or does the well oxygenated water tend to produce those harder hits? It was a lad on the north coast who helped convince me a few years ago that at least 2/0 or 3/0 single hooks were the way to with my metals in the surf - hence me pushing for single and treble hooks to be provided with the Savage Gear Surf Seekers - but as per this blog post here from a while back, I did give up with using singles on hard lures. Yes it might just be me, but I gave all this enough time to form enough opinions, and in the surf I fish 3/0 single hooks on the back of my Seekers.
When you take a product to market there might be an aspect somewhere in the mix which isn’t always exactly what you want for yourself, and the Sandeel Pencil 150 SW is a good example. It’s a lure I very much wanted to see by the way, indeed I pushed for a fixed-hook version of the Line-Thru Sandeel from way before I did any work with Savage Gear. Nope, it was how we rigged the Sandeel Pencil 150. We spent a lot of time thinking about and working on this. I tend to like the biggest hooks possible but I have to then recognise that bigger hooks can put some anglers off. The Sandeel Pencil 150 comes rigged with a #6 treble in the middle and a #4 treble on the rear, plus there’s also a #3/0 single included. It works. I’d have loved a larger size middle treble, but go bigger than a #6 and it can end up wrapping around the back of the lure. For any of my bass fishing where I am not in the surf I will tend to use the Sandeel Pencil SW 90 and 125 lures as they come rigged in the packet, but with the larger 150 size I do tend to replace the rear #4 treble and put a larger #2 Savage Gear Savage SGY 2X treble hook on the back. In the surf I tend to also remove the middle treble hook and just use the supplied #3/0 single hook on the rear of the 150. As always, all barbs are crushed.
I am talking about this lure because Andy and I had the bulk of our bass on Friday night on the Matte White Sandeel Pencil 150. Some fish were at range and some weren’t. Whack it out and wind it in like you might a needlefish in the dark, whack it out and wind it in like you might a metal in a bit of surf, whack it out and wind it in like you might a shallow-diving hard lure over a bit of reef, and so on. I completely subscribe to the less is so often more thing in bass fishing, and on Friday night the Sandeel Pencil 150 was slaying……...
But both Andy and I did hook but then lose just about enough bass to get my brain bouncing, and with how bass seem to hit lures in the surf (conditions weren’t remotely hectic on Friday night), I do wonder if it was the way the Sandeel Pencil 150 comes rigged which was the issue. I had the one Matte White Sandeel Pencil 150 with me and it was rigged exactly as it comes out of the packet which as I said has done me just fine for non-surf conditions (see here for example). I hadn’t really thought about it before I went out fishing. It did me just fine on Friday night because I landed a bunch of bass, but I did also drop a few fish which I’d have expected to stay hooked, and when there’s a bit of surf running I do tend to wonder whether the smaller #4 treble on the rear of what is a fairly long lure doesn’t quite suit how the bass often smash into lures in these situations.
Sorry, it sounds like I am tying myself in knots a bit here, but there is a method to my thinking. There were enough bass around on Friday night to experiment a bit, so I ended up taking my Sandeel Pencil 150 off and clipping on a 30g Surf Seeker rigged with the #3/0 single hook (which I had pushed for to be supplied with the lure) - and I didn’t drop another bass. I like to think that because it was night fishing I was retrieving my Seeker a little slower than I might during the day, but I bet you I wasn’t actually doing this. Nope, I continue to be amazed at how easily bass can locate a lure in the dark, and I come back around to how abortive my first night fishing attempts once were because I had been told so many times that you need to turn the reel handle so slowly at night and sometimes my hard lure would literally wash up at my feet because I’d lost touch with it and wondered what the hell was going on. Every time I go fishing bass end up amazing me somehow and something happens which keeps me thinking and experimenting and loving the whole learning process……………..
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