Can there sometimes be so much bait around that it can negatively affect the bass fishing?

And yes, I am wondering if that might be the case around here a bit at the moment. For sure we got lucky the other day when we found a load of birds working on bait which was being driven up by bass, but Mark sent me a short video clip from the coastline earlier this week when he was out fishing - and I have never seen anything like it around here. An incredible mass of gannets especially diving continuously into some kind of baitfish, too far out to reach from the shore, but if there’s that much food in the water then could it be argued that why would most of the bass be anywhere else but feeding on that bait?

I remember an Ireland co-guiding trip we had over in Kerry a few years back. We had some really good tides together with some half decent conditions, and although we caught a few bass to be honest it wasn’t how it should be when conditions are in your favour. What we did have though was a mass of sea birds diving and working on bait literally all day every day in the corner of the bay. Can you imagine how much bait there must have been for so many birds to be feeding on it for days on end? We don’t know because we aren’t fish, but we came to what we thought was a logical conclusion - any self-respecting bass was going to be hanging around that easy to eat food source for as long as possible. Would you rather hunt a wild chicken down across the wilds of Surrey - do wild chickens actually exist and yes, I know Surrey isn’t exactly wild! - or would it be somewhat easier to go to the supermarket and buy one?

I was walking Storm the other morning and a friend passed me in his car and stopped for a yap. He was telling me about a session he had out on his boat just the other day and he showed me some screenshots from his fish-finder of some huge shoals of mackerel with some distinctive looking marks of bass literally right underneath them. This then got me thinking about when we came across a load of mackerel last weekend which we were literally struggling to get through - could there have been bass underneath them which firstly we weren’t getting to, and secondly were they completely dialled in on mackerel anyway? It makes me think about how much I hear from across the pond about a lot of the striped bass anglers really concentrating on matching the hatch when there’s a lot of bait around which the fish can become so preoccupied with.

I don’t actually know whether my theories stack up at all by the way, and in some respects it seems slightly daft that for so much of this year it seemed to be fairly quiet out on my local coastline in terms of bait and so on - and look at now. Note though that this might not have been the case at all because of course we don’t get to see much of it save for when it swims past or feeding birds point the way - but here we are and it’s not far off Xmas yet the coast feels alive with so much bait around. Is this in any way normal or is this another case of 2021 being a rather strange year all round? You all have a good weekend.