Any of you here going to be doing more estuary fishing for bass this year?

If I had known how fascinating it was to chase mainly the one species of fish I’d have started obsessing about bass fishing a lot earlier in my fishing life. I was having a look through my bass grip and grin photo library the other day and it’s very noticeable how most of the double figure bass I have seen caught from the shore have come from estuaries. My own best bass of 2020, 2019 and 2018 came from estuaries, it was a while when I last saw a 10lb+ bass caught from the open coast, and whilst I get the argument that estuaries can sometimes be places where a lot of small bass congregate and we have a system of bass nurseries that are meant to help protect these fish (but let’s not get into how well all that works or doesn’t work), estuaries are very obviously places where bigger bass also swim plus it’s not exactly hard to move away and stop catching heaps of small bass if you come across them.

Over the years we have done a lot of bumping various soft plastics on jig heads in a good bit of current on the back tide, and over in Ireland especially. I have been fortunate enough to have been part of some amazing bass fishing sessions where serious numbers of good fish are hitting lures like the Black Minnow or MegaBass XLayer and so on, and over time fishing like this I started to think of it as very much like the Czech-nymphing approach in freshwater fly fishing. The current and bottom is working the lure or the fly for you, and it’s up to you the angler to control and maintain contact. Bass hits like this in a decent bit of current are electric, and like with surf fishing where smaller fish give such an amazing account of themselves, any size bass in strong currents are fantastic.

There is a huge amount to this kind of bass fishing and I have so much more to keep on learning about it, and especially at night which I haven’t actually done that much of in estuaries because I often find that a bit of current seems to almost cancel out those calm and lifeless conditions which I don’t like in daylight hours out on the coast. And as with open coast bass fishing, there is so much fun stuff to try and learn about when chasing these fine fish in our numerous estuaries, and as with open coast bassing again, when you dial down into it there’s a hell of lot of water out there and trying to find fish can sometimes be pretty daunting. I live near the huge Tamar waterway and although I have been lucky enough to catch a few nice bass from it, to be perfectly honest the sheer size of this estuary freaks me out in many respects because if I’m blanking somewhere I can’t help but look around at all that water and think about how many places a few fish might actually be when they aren’t in front of me!

It’s very easy to get almost locked into one way of chasing bass because you might love fishing like this, or you have done well with this method in the past, but I would suggest that chasing bass in estuaries calls for a varied approach if you enjoy moving around and trying different parts of a typical estuary. I do. Bumping plastics or working surface lures at say the mouth of an estuary on the last of the ebb tide is somewhat different to almost stalking the margins on the hunt for bass in amongst the bladderwrack or current seams and so on. A lot of my thinking behind the Gravity Stick range of soft plastics and the various rigging options came about from estuary fishing, and a lot of the future work we are doing on more rigging options and lure sizes and colours and so on are again influenced by estuary based bass fishing.

I think about wading out into a raging bit of early morning surf and banging something like a 35g Surf Seeker out there on a longer, more powerful lure rod and heftier Penn Slammer 3500 spinning reel, and then I think about a really quiet evening on a flat calm estuary with a wand of a lure rod rod and reel in my hand, a soft plastic on the end rigged weedless and weightless, and I can see signs of moving fish. We’re fishing for the same species of fish in the same country in the same general area, but how different are those two approaches to catching the same fish? This is SO much to do with why bass fishing consumes me so utterly these days - the same species of fish, but fishing for them on a bouncy open coast or calm, quiet inland waterway can feel like two different countries let alone two different terrains. You all have a good weekend, stay safe, and remember, men in tights is a good thing……………

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