Another way of looking at the whole “you don’t need distance because all the best bass are caught close in” thing

I don’t know if any of you here listen to any fishing podcasts, but the two best ones I know of and listen to regularly are the Surfcasters’ Journal Night Shift and Seven Stripes Fishing podcasts. Both podcasts are from the USA and they tend to talk about species of fish we don’t catch over here - save for some bluefin tuna talk - but fishing is still fishing the world over, and I defy anybody here to listen to these excellent podcasts and not hear something useful or thought provoking which might improve their own fishing and/or the way they might think about things.

But first off, don’t make the mistake that some anglers do and think that just because a species of fish like striped bass grow much bigger than our quite glorious bass that all anglers who fish for stripers are therefore much better anglers than we are over here. They quite simply are not, indeed I have ducked down for my own safety on the Cape Cod Canal just as much as I would expect to duck down around a big group of anglers all fishing close together over here! But of course there are some seriously good striped bass and tuna anglers over there, just as there are some seriously good (European sea) bass anglers over here - and I would argue that any angler anywhere can learn something from a good angler whatever they fish for, wherever they fish, and however they go about their fishing. Often it’s the thinking behind the actual fishing that is of greater value as such than the actual fish which are caught……………….

So I was listening to the episode above of the excellent Seven Stripes podcast over the weekend, and although most of the chat is about striped bass and especially fly fishing for them at night, I will come and personally examine the contents of your head if you take the time to listen to this particular episode and at least something the two lads discuss doesn’t get you thinking about your own fishing. If I remember this correctly, at one point one of the lads makes a reference to some of the age old striped bass anglers’ mantra that the biggest fish are always caught very close in, and that did this theory come about in part because technology simply didn’t exist in the good old days to fish certain kinds of ground at range as well as obviously close in? How many times have you heard the exact same thing said in regard to our bass fishing over here? “All that casting a mile is a waste of time, all the best bass are caught close in” etc.

And by no means am I about to say that what we refer to as “big bass” are not often caught very close in when we are fishing from the shore or kayaks or even SUPs. But if you take a big shallow reef where any lure fished deeper than a foot or two is going to get snagged, in the good old days when men were men and spinning rods were 20’ long, did the lures especially but also the rods and reels and mainlines exist to help an angler cover a hell of a lot of this type of water? I’m not saying it didn’t by the way because I came to this bass fishing obsession relatively recently, but there surely has to be an argument that we have access to an increasing amount of fishing tackle which helps us to cover a lot more different types of ground at all kinds of ranges. I would also suggest that if you are fishing a huge area of reef that is beset with gullies and holes and features that a big bass or two could be almost anywhere - and not just close in. On the flipside it’s almost too easy to to blast lures to the horizon and then forget about the ground almost beneath your feet.

I think back to when a very good angler called Graham Hill was kind enough to start really showing me the ropes with bass fishing, and we used to fish a particular spot in south east Ireland that was beset with a lot of reefy ground. Graham used to love that Storm Jointed Thunderstick lure which cast like a banana on a good day but caught him a huge amount of good bass, and the extent of my knowledge at the time was about as much as a Maria Chase BW and the odd surface lure which felt very alien to me. Killer lure and all that, but a shallow diver it wasn’t, after I snagged and lost a few of the Maria lures I learnt to keep away from large parts of this mark because I couldn’t fish them with the lures I had plus my lack of knowledge. How much did I miss out on though because I couldn’t target certain areas that I now know would have definitely held bass? Graham caught his fair share of big bass for sure, but would he have caught even more if he could have covered even more ground because he would have put a better casting shallow-diver out a lot further into a bit of wind especially?

It’s all speculation of course, but I really enjoy how learning about how other anglers fish and think. I look back to a lot of the ground that Graham used to take me to and I think about how I would target it now with what I’ve learnt. I remember when I first stumbled across the IMA Komomo SF-125 on the Bass Lures stand at one of those huge CLA Game Fairs some years ago, and over some fishing time I realised that now I had a longer-casting ultra shallow-diving hard lure which helped me access more ground on more marks. Then in due course came a much better understanding of soft plastics and all they can do for us in their many different guises. The day I stop enjoying thinking about fishing and also looking for knowledge and inspiration from other anglers all around the world is the day I take up washing and polishing my Epic Berlingo……………..