Can a stealthier approach sometimes pay off in bass fishing? (nice fish!)

I don’t know how many of you here are in a similar boat to me, but the bulk of my fishing before I fell for this bass lure addiction thing was bait fishing with a beachcaster or two. A stealthier approach when you’re banging crab baits out into the murky water of somewhere like the Bristol Channel ain’t going to produce any more fish for you, but then I started seriously getting into light tackle muller fishing - and I started learning all about a much stealthier approach around these spooky as hell fish……………..

Then via work I began to spend a lot of time around fly fishing, and if you speak to any decent fly angler who fishes in rivers especially, they sure as hell are playing more of the ninja game. I can remember a day on a very remote saltwater flat in the middle of the Indian Ocean when a client was brought back to the mother ship to change (the colour of) his shirt because the giant trevally kept turning away from the fly at the last moment. A fish synonymous with all out aggression, yet they might well refuse if something isn’t quite right in their eyes I guess. The bloke changed his shirt and caught fish.

So what makes our bass any different to trout or GTs or bonefish or carp? I grant you that there are loads of times when we are bass fishing and where we stand to fish or what we wear isn’t going to make any difference at all. But what if you are fishing a mark where the bass are going to be potentially mooching around really, really close in? If launching baits to the horizon is where you come from - me included - then you might never have given a second thought to bass being a perfectly normal fish and potentially spooking if something isn’t quite right. Depends where and how you fish does it not?

I didn’t shoot many photos the other day when I suggested to a couple of mates that we fish the location I talked about the other day - at a very different state of the tide though to see what might happen - and something jumped out at me on a few of the photos. What do you notice above with the two photos side by side? Both the lads here are what I would call bloody good bass anglers, but one of them caught and one of them didn’t. I know it’s only a couple of moments in time, but Mark with the bass you can see on this blog post chooses to really hang back from the water’s edge or use the cover of trees whenever possible. He caught. One fishing session on a brand new mark doesn’t prove a whole lot, I accept that, but I also landed a bass on one of the Z-Man creature baits earlier in the session, and I was very deliberately hanging right back from the water’s edge.

Earlier on I had been literally stroking the back of a 5lb+ mullet with my rod tip until it obviously went and spooked, then I suddenly saw a proper bass mooching around - which then spooked. I took that as a sign I was way too close to the water and I backed away. A little while later I hooked and landed a bass almost ridiculously close to the bank on one of the Z-Man creature baits. The photos of Mark’s fish here don’t do it any justice at all because of the angle I had to shoot with the sun and the background, but it was chunky as hell and I’d have given it perhaps nudging 7lb. The Sleeper Craw doing its thing yet again, and what a buzz to see a bass of this size coming out of a brand new mark which I believe has some serious potential and which I am going to enjoy learning way more about. You all have a good weekend, here’s to a 3-0 Lions series!!!

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