An 82cms bass that was caught by one of our clients over in Kerry has been recaptured (and released again) after nearly two years

On 23rd September 2018 John Quinlan and I were working with four anglers over in Kerry. We weren’t a million miles away from getting the lads back for supper after another long day in paradise, and we had them fishing an area of Ballinskelligs Bay at a state of tide which made a lot of sense. The lads were catching a few fish and then out of the blue Paul goes and hooks an absolute donkey of a bass. As I described it on a blog post here, Paul did absolutely everything right, and in not much time at all I am asking him to gently cradle his fine fish for a few photos. For a bunch of different reasons I don’t want to spend too long getting these photos of such a big bass - its size and age, where we were fishing and where Paul could safely kneel down and keep the fish in the water between photos (what a save eh Paul?!), John is part of an Irish bass tagging programme and that needed to be done, and we obviously wanted to get this fish safely back in the water - but we got a few snaps which I hope did such a mighty bass at least a bit of justice……………..

This bass at 82cms long from September 2018

And then I got a call from John the other day to tell me that Paul’s 82cms bass had been recaptured. That was all we knew until John got an email with all the details from a bloke on the Bass Programme, and it’s some fascinating stuff. I would hazard a guess that most of us here would never even entertain the thought of killing a big old bass like this if we wanted a bit of fish for the table, but as much as us bass anglers tend to practice a lot of catch and release, from time to time I do hear various arguments that the big fish especially perhaps don’t do that well. Surely the recapture of this bass is proof that releasing big fish can and does work, and I would also hope that as anglers and guides we did every single thing that we could to make sure Paul’s bass was safely returned, whilst accepting that yes we shot some photos, and yes John got a tag in there so that more can be learnt about how to protect these fine fish. Unless fish like this are sometimes recaptured and thankfully reported though, a part of you can’t help but wonder what then happens when you watch a fish like this swim away again. I obviously hope that all goes well and another angler may get to catch this fish again and then release it.

My apologies in advance, I have borrowed a screenshot of this recaptured bass, if the angler who caught it (nicely done!) would like this photo removed from this blog post, please get in touch and I will do so

Which is exactly what happened. 705 days after Paul caught and released his bass of a lifetime, it was recaptured by a bait angler fishing in Ballinskelligs Bay, and not very far from where John put the tag into it as well. Thankfully this bait angler saw the tag, took a couple of close up photos of the number, and then got in touch with the relevant people to report the (re)capture (www.fisheriesireland.ie). Paul’s bass I’m going to call it was not measured by this angler a week or so ago, but she was weighed at 14.9lbs and then safely released. We didn’t weigh the bass but obviously measured it at 82cms, and this bait angler didn’t measure it but did weigh it at 14.9lbs. How heavy was it when Paul landed it back in September 2018 and how long was it when this lad recaptured it on 29th August 2020? Whatever the case, damn that’s a big bass, and yet again it rams home how at least a percentage of bass seem to be inclined to return to the same areas, which in turn makes a lot of this raping of the bass stocks going on here in Cornwall especially even more worrying because it does seem that specific areas can be badly damaged as regards their “local” bass populations.

John Quinlan tagging a bass that one of our clients caught over in Kerry

You can see how a regular tag goes into the bass and obviously stays there just fine and doesn’t impede the fish

There are so many questions that this recaptured and re-released bass have raised and which I’d love to know the answers to but accept that this is unlikely. I am aware of some acoustic transmitting tagging bass studies where the fish have to be aerated and opened up to insert the tag and then stitched back up again, indeed I have watched it being done by a fisheries bloke as we caught a bunch of bass over on the south coast of Ireland. I remember thinking that surely at least a percentage of these fish were not going to survive such a procedure but I weighed this up in my head against the good that learning more and and more about these fish from a scientific point of view could do. The fish did survive though. I always ask that our clients over in Kerry crush the barbs on all their hard and soft lures, and it goes without saying that any lures I carry for our anglers to use don’t have any barbs on the hooks. Did the fact that we could so easily remove Paul’s IMA Hound 125F Glide lure from his 82cms bass help matters? I continue to believe that we should not be using barbs on hooks if we intend to release our fish. Where has that big bass been for the last two years, and how much weight has she put on if we accept that at 82cms it was a big bass but was not 14.9lbs as it was on 29th August of this year? For such a big and presumably old bass to survive the ordeal we put her through means at least in many respects we did a lot of stuff right in September 2018 when Paul caught her, but is there more or indeed less that we could be doing to help these fish survive when we catch and release them? Whatever the answers may or may not be, I think it’s pretty amazing when you think of the odds that one single very big bass has evaded commercial efforts and been recaptured by an angler very close to where this same fish gave us all so much joy nearly two years ago………………...

These bass we caught had acoustic transmitting tags actually put inside them, and they survived to give a lot of valuable data