Big boulders, bouncy conditions, the fish are going to be very close in - do you go longer or shorter?

We had an interesting situation yesterday afternoon in some stunning bass fishing conditions but pretty filthy weather which wasn’t exactly conducive to much creative photography. We were fishing a small area of big boulders which quickly gave way to sand, as in the rocks don’t stretch far out to sea. I have fished this area before but I willingly concede far greater skill and knowledge to the lad that Andy and I were fishing with. Leigh knows this ground like the back of his hand, and it’s pretty bloody impressive what he catches from terrain like this. It requires a lot of walking and scrambling and endless ups and downs, together with dodging of waves, and I would imagine that it’s not remotely for everyone. Personally I find this style of bass fishing incredibly exciting, and I also love it when it’s physically demanding because it’s good for me………

Anyway, we found a few fish, including this plump 4lb+ bass for Leigh which he took on a lure that he uses a lot, the Illex Nitro Slim Shad, rigged on a Savage Gear Sandeel jig head. I landed a few from the boulders on the Savage Gear Sandeel V2 14cm/33g and the Sandeel V2 Weedless 13cm/33g, and I was using those specific lures because I would be stupid not to talk to and learn from how Leigh approaches this type of ground. I ask questions because I am interested, and I can’t pretend to ever understand people who show no inkling to want to learn from other anglers. You’re fishing for the most part almost right in amongst the boulders where you can imagine the bass are using all the turbulence to hit various prey species which aren’t quite able to tuck away as effectively as they would when it’s calm.

We all got bumped a few times as well and I missed a really good hit right after I landed a bass on the Sandeel V2 Weedless and cast back out again. I had momentarily stopped winding because to be perfectly honest I was thinking something profound (?) about how the (sample) rod was working in these conditions - and bang, the bass hit me on the drop. I landed and returned the fish, and cast out again. Just before the lure hit the water I snapped the bale arm over on my Authority 2500 to tighten the braid out in the onshore wind. Literally as the lure hit the water and I let it start a bit of a controlled drop I got walloped, but the bass didn’t connect. Damn.

Anyway, what I wanted to get at was this - we landed the fish we hooked mainly because when we connected with those fish we happened to be standing in specific spots where you could just about manhandle the fish in. In such a bouncy sea like that there was no way you were getting very close to the water at all, indeed a few of the waves got pretty interesting to say the least. If the bass had been considerably bigger I’d have fancied our chances of not landing some of them because of the combination of ground and sea state and danger levels. What really struck me on a few occasions as I moved around was that from a few vantage points I was never going to land anything half-decent if I went and hooked up. Thinking about it now I am rather grateful not to have caught a bass from at least two specific vantage points because I simply would not have actually landed a bigger bass. I will push things when it makes sense but I am not stupid, and it would have been stupid trying to get near the water.

So the makeup of the terrain and the way it seems best to approach it suggests to me that carrying a shorter lure rod makes a lot of sense when you are literally dropping and lobbing lures around to fish so specifically. You can see where you want to fish the most and it ain’t far out at all, so why use a longer lure rod when distance has nothing to do with it? By all means do so of course, I don’t mean that you can’t, rather that a shorter lever makes more sense to me here when you are so often fishing literally under your feet.

Which is all good and dandy when you aren’t faced with the sort of conditions we (gratefully) found yesterday and most of the time you can’t get very near the water at all. It’s a different makeup to what I found down in SW Portugal last year when the ground and conditions could be seriously savage but a lot of the time you did need to really get bigger and more stable lures out there because that’s where the most interesting features are - yet I can’t help but think of somebody like Grant Woodgate of Samson Lures and his longer lure rod approach to it. Watch some of his videos on YouTube and you will notice how often he literally lifts a bass out of the water via a controlled lift of one of his 12’ Samson rods. It can be done on more powerful lure rods, but you need to make sure you don’t high-stick the thing and snap it.

And I couldn’t help but think about this literally lifting the fish out thing when I was fishing yesterday from those specific couple of vantage points where I actually got lucky NOT to hookup. I know it’s getting pretty specific when you start thinking about tailoring a rod and reel outfit almost specifically to a somewhat narrow combination of location and conditions, but if you can do so, would you? I managed to lift my bass out of the water yesterday because the rod could cope with the relative size of the bass, but I also know what Leigh has landed from this area and he lost a frigging donkey fairly recently, right beneath his feet.

So would you go longer or shorter? I can see all the benefits of a shorter lure rod for more regular conditions over ground like this, but now give me what we found yesterday and potentially a good bit more - if the water is green and free of weed of course - and I am drawn to the longer and far more powerful lure rod approach and it’s not as if I am requiring when I fish like this. I could easily take that pretty cheap but very easy to use and nicely powerful Savage Gear SGS5 10’ 18-56g lure rod together with say a Penn Slammer IV 3500 or Authority 3500, fill the reel up with something like the 36lb Berkley Sick X8 braid and the strong as hell 0.50mm Savage Gear Super Hard Fluorocarbon leader, then work on seeing what size bass I could literally lift out of the water if I do things correctly. I wonder how say the Samson Long Cast Expanse 12’ 15-60g rod might do for this as well? A bit specialist it might well be, but if you end up targeting a specific type of terrain in specific conditions and you want to be in with the best possible chance of landing a good bass? Why the hell not would be my first question……………….

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