Come on, who’s been reliving particular fish or lost fish or fishing sessions and planning what you might do when we can get back out there?

An enforced time like this away from fishing doesn’t half mess with the head, and on so many different levels as well. Conditions around here would have been pretty bouncy and potentially rather tasty yesterday I reckon, and as a friend reminded me, it was exactly a year ago yesterday when we had a good early session on the bass and I hooked one particular fish which wasn’t that keen on coming in. The hooks came out pretty quickly and I have thought long and hard about how big that bass might have been - a monster for sure because it came off! - but more than that I was going through that early morning session in my head yesterday and reliving what happened and how I went about my own fishing……………

How often are we fishing to the best of our ability? How often do you head out fishing to a particular place where you might have done well before and fish exactly the same way because it’s worked before? I’m not saying that this is a bad thing by the way, but I was looking through some notes from a few sessions in April last year and something jumped out at me. My mate Mark and I were fishing a spot where we have fished a fair bit together, and because we have both caught bass there I guess we have kinda honed our own slightly different ways of fishing it. A bit of bounce out on the open coast does tend to push one towards certain kinds of lures and techniques, but in my notes I read that during this session Mark landed a few nice bass up to about 5lbs and I never had a sniff. In those session notes was a note to myself that Mark was fishing this rock mark a bit differently that morning to how he would tend to - and it worked. What I was doing very obviously didn’t work because I didn’t land a single fish!

Now this doesn’t mean I’m going to start carrying a load more lures with me, but I do reckon the types of hard and soft lures I might take bass fishing with me these days has changed over the years. There’s obviously more soft plastics in there than there used to be, depending on location and conditions of course, but whereas I might have taken as many different shallow-diving hard lures as I could carry back in the day, I guess that now I have a favourite or two and I feel perfectly confident with less. Okay, so the whole dark lure thing has been playing on my mind for a while now, as per a recentish blog post here, but do I really need six different surface lures if I know a particular location really well? How about instead of thrashing the water with a surface lure because it’s worked well before I try a different approach because who knows, it might work better?

I have never been a counter of fish and if you asked me at the end of a good session how many bass I might have caught I wouldn’t have a clue. I simply don’t care, and whilst I do accept that we prefer catching bigger fish that pull harder, what tends to float my boat the most is if I try a different lure or technique or what have you - and then catch a bass. If that bass is 2lbs or 8lbs, it doesn’t matter to me, because it’s the doing something different which gets me so excited. It all comes back to confidence and me knowing that I’m not wasting my time because it’s worked for me already.

A number of anglers have had a pop at me over the years for me not being in any of the grip grins with bass which I might have caught, but I’m not wired to need a photographic record of my fish. My best bass of 2019 was caught and weighed (rare for me to do this) when fishing on my own, I don’t have a single photo of it, and it hasn’t bothered me for a moment. If I’d been fishing with a friend I’d have asked them to kindly hold the fish so I could take some photos which I then tend to use for magazines and blog posts and what have you, but on my own and I’m slipping the barbless hook or hooks out and getting the bass straight back. Nope, what really floated my boat about that nice bass was that I was trying something a bit different to what I might usually do on that spot, and it went and worked - that’s what sticks in my head the most. Not the size of the fish really, but how and when and hopefully why.

What I do know though is how we seem to be living through some sort of weird Groundhog Day where I wake up early as per usual and come downstairs and pretend that life is all back to normal until I check the BBC website and see that it’s very obviously not. The weather has been truly glorious and we are luckier than a lot of people with where we live, but it matters not. When that freedom of movement which we take completely for granted is taken away and we can’t go where we want when we want, crumbs does it hit home. I’m not one for political stuff or what have you, but us regular folk must surely demand that the incredible people who are on the frontline of all this in so many different ways are the ones who deserve the most - thanks, holidays, pay rises, job security etc. Many things make the world go round, but I can’t pretend that I have given a single second’s thought recently to the bankers and hedge fund managers and so on. When the proverbial hits the fan like this, who are we all looking to and eternally grateful for? I hope you are all doing as well as possible……………...