Anybody else having a strange start to whatever the bass season actually is these days?

On Saturday morning I fished a session with a friend in the most perfect conditions you could hope to have. Every single thing about it was what I wanted, albeit the swell was too much for where I had initially intended to fish but it didn’t matter because I had a backup mark which on the size of the tide I kinda preferred anyway. Green water, virtually no weed, lovely bit of bounce, perfect size of tide as I said………….

But somebody forgot to tell the bass that we were after them. Andy and I thrashed the water to a foam for hours. We tried every single trick in the book in every single gully and hole and general area I have personally caught bass from or otherwise seen bass caught from. From surface lures to bumping the bottom, if there had been a bass around I’d have seriously fancied our chances of catching it. A blank is a blank though and it’s part and parcel of fishing, but with those conditions and tide size and everything else, I will admit to being a bit shocked that we didn’t even get a bang from a fish. Are any of you reading this having a strange start to whatever the bass season actually is these days?

Most anglers I know or communicate with had what most of us would term a late start to things kicking off last year. There are surely a number of different reasons as to why that was the case, so when I landed my first bass of the new season in early April this year which I would class as a more “normal” time to see a few bass if the conditions are good (as you know, I include January and then February this year as last season), everything felt a whole lot better than last year when down here we had multiple nights of frost in April and then that late start. Was there a connection?

For a while in April the fishing was pretty good around here - conditions and what they tend to dictate taken into consideration of course - indeed I had my first few fish from a specific area somewhat earlier than I ever have done before. I used the confidence from the more “normal” start to go and give it a go because why the hell not? But is anybody else finding things rather scratchy out there at the moment though?

There may have been no bass around on Saturday morning, but at least there were some pretty flowers!

It feels like we were tempted with that pretty good start to the so-called bass season, but it currently feels strangely quiet out there. I was seeing signs of different birds feeding on bait early on, but apart from Andy spotting a load of birds feeding on something further offshore on Saturday morning, I can’t recall seeing signs of bait around for a while now. We are picking the odd bass up but I wouldn’t call it remotely consistent with some of the conditions we have been getting, and because we are human beings and not fish I feel like I am floundering around trying to attach some logic to it.

I remember from my bait fishing days that we always tend to get a week or two of east based winds sometime in March or April, but this year was a long one. I wonder if the extended calm and settled sea state we got around here has done something to whatever bait source the bass would be coming inshore for around this time of year? The moment we did get a bit of bounce back on the sea the other day I got very over excited and did my usual running down the cliffs to get at the lovely fizzed up looking water, only to be crushed by so much weed in the water which rendered it completely unfishable.

We are anglers and we always want what we can’t have though, but am I the only angler here clutching at straws and wondering why things got going but then seem to have gone quiet again? When the bass fishing gets back whatever normal is these days of course we will forget all about this “blip”, but wow does it fascinate and frustrate me how nature goes about her business in ways which we will never come close to fully understanding. I would imagine that any of you here who are finding things a bit quiet out there will have a few apparently logical thoughts and ideas as to why, but do we really have the foggiest?