Broke my “creature bait in an estuary” duck (crab imitation lure?), but it wasn’t with a bass……….

I have said it so many times, but fishing to me is so much about the people, and I do love fishing with kind anglers who happen to be very good at fishing, who think outside of the box, and are keen to share what they keep on learning. I spent most of Friday with a couple of these types of anglers at a quiet estuary location, and although the flat calm conditions and bright winter sunshine was never going to be very helpful on the bass front, a few fish were caught. But they weren’t just bass………….

Danny and David have been catching good numbers of bass on these creature baits which to me seem to be an obvious sort of crab imitation. Whether the bass see them as a crab is something I guess we will never quite know, but with the numbers of wrasse that many of us have nailed on these types of lures I am going to have to make some sort of (human) logical assumption. I remain fascinated with this approach to bass fishing, but to be honest I have done very little with it since I dropped a couple of bass over in Kerry earlier in the year. I am very aware of what these two anglers specifically have been doing and I think it’s bloody brilliant how they have really thought about things and tailored their approach to catch bass which sometimes - again, I have to assume here - seem to be head-down and feeding hard on the bottom on the hunt for prey such as crabs and prawns and so on. What interests me almost more than anything here is how well they have done at night on the nailed hard to the bottom creature baits. Yep, the old brain is bouncing away!

The Berkley creature bait I am on about below

Anyway, we met up to fish an estuary mark which was new to me but which looked pretty interesting. Bass were caught but I will talk about them another time, because the crux to this blog post today is that Henry here went and broke his “creature bait in an estuary” duck! My mate Andy landed a bass on one of those MegaBass Dark Sleeper paddletail type soft plastics which he was trundling along the bottom - sneaky git! - and although I do own a couple of the all-in-one MegaBass Sleeper Craw lures and had been fishing one for a bit (lure, weight and hook together, it’s a bloody clever design, they are not cheap though), I had then turned to a 10g cheb-rigged Berkley Hollow Body Craw 10cm. I am not sure if this lure is called the Berkley Hollow Body Craw or Berkley Pulse Realistic Craw because it says both on the packet, but I like the look of them and they sit rather well behind the cheb-weight on the 4/0 corkscrew weedless hook we did for the 120mm size Gravity Sticks. Please understand that I am at day one here while I try this stuff out, and that Danny and David have caught big numbers of bass on the all-in-one MegaBass Sleeper Craw which makes so much sense in a bunch of different ways.

A while later I felt a hard, sharp “tap” on my lure and I struck into what felt like a half-tidy bass. I gave it the gears and I wasn’t far from walking out of the water to beach the fish before the swine came off. It was definitely a bass and I couldn’t have cared if it was 1lb or 10lbs. I just wanted to actually land a bass on a creature bait, but once again it wasn’t to be and I might have let myself down with the stream of language that poured forth from my potty-mouth. A father of two adult girls I might well be, but it doesn’t mean I am any more grownup than I never was.

Another few casts later and I had this strange kind of bite where it felt like my creature bait was lifted up off the bottom as the fish moved towards me. I came with it a bit and then set the hook, but the fish didn’t feel at all bass-like. A bit earlier Danny had landed a decent size tub-gurnard on a MegaBass Sleeper Craw lure. I reckon the last gurnard I saw on a lure was over in Ireland when a mate landed one or two on a Fiiish Black Minnow bumped in a good run of current. I can’t pretend that I was very amused when I saw a gurnard on the end of my line, and I allowed my line to go slack and the fish slipped the barbless hook and swam away.

Don’t get me wrong, I had broken my estuary based creature bait duck, but I’d have given anything for it to be a bass and not a gurnard! I think there were seven tub gurnard caught on creature baits between us during that session. I didn’t trouble the scorer any further myself, and when the tide turned and we lost the flow we headed off. I will tell you about what happened next on another blog post because I got to see a nice bass nailed on a creature bait and it’s got my head bouncing away all over again like you would not believe……………

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