Caught my first Isle of Wight bass!

My in-laws live on the Isle of Wight so I have been going down there for many years now, more often than not around Christmas or New Year or Feb half-term and so on. My girls are there teaching sailing for a few weeks and my wife is spending time with her folks. I love my wife and girls and I want to see them, especially with having been away a good bit recently, so I spent most of last week on the Isle of Wight. Me going fishing is never an issue, but I haven’t taken my gear with me before. I did last week though, and thanks to a very kind local angler who kindly asked me to come along fishing with him, I went and caught my first ever Isle of Wight bass!

We met up at 4am and this lad brought me down onto what looked like some very shallow and rather lovely looking ground. We covered a good bit of ground and from time to time there were signs of fish moving around, then out of the blue a smallish bass went and nailed my Savage Gear Slender Scoop Shad in the smaller 11cm size. The guy I was fishing with had told me how he often does well with smaller soft plastics and it made a lot of sense with the ground we were fishing and how quiet and calm and clear it was. He caught a few bass on a smaller soft plastic and I also had a few more good bumps and swirls. I have never subscribed to needing only big lures for big bass, indeed I have come back home thinking about how I might better present some of the smaller soft plastics on the sort of marks I fish around here. Cue rummaging around to find different jig heads etc.

Things definitely went much quieter as the sun came up so we packed it in and headed back to our respective gaffs for breakfast. With the amount of weed I am struggling against around here - yesterday evening being another example of lovely conditions ruined by copious amounts of weed - it was rather lovely to be able to fish that session on the Isle of Wight and not have weed mess things up. Talk about lucking out with the best week of the “summer” so far as well, and I also managed to go for a run every morning I was there. Me, a newfound running addiction? Never! Managed 115kms (71.5 miles) of running for July which makes it 100kms+ per month for the last three months. Walking flat out up a steep cliff path last night with a rucksack on my back and waist waders on felt amazing, being so much fitter and stronger is so damn good…………

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