Do you ever sort of see a fishing spot all over again, almost like you’ve got a different set of eyes?

Hear me out here because thinking about this helped get “power” through my 10k run early yesterday morning! Let’s say you have fished a spot a few times. You might have got to know it okay and caught a bunch of fish. You like the ground but it isn’t a spot you rush back to time after time because for whatever reason you haven’t quite fully appreciated what is actually there. Then at some point further down the road you sort of end up “re-seeing” the mark, or re-evaluating the ground and realising that it’s actually some frigging awesome terrain and you seriously need to be fishing it more…………….

Maybe it’s just me here, but this exact thing has happened to me a few times over the years, indeed it’s been happening recently with a specific stretch of coastline. I’ve fished there numerous times before and sometimes had some good bass fishing, but up until recently I hadn’t fully appreciated just how awesome the ground actually is. I don’t know why and of course it’s my fault as an angler, but I guess these things happen. How come this occasional re-evaluation then? Maybe a mate comes along with you and his or her amazement at the ground helps you to kinda see it all over again, almost like you’ve got a different set of eyes this time around. Or maybe you catch fish from a specific part of the mark which you had not targeted before. I can think of a few marks I fish far more regularly now where I had fished plenty of times before, but then for some reason I began to see the locations a bit differently and ended up fully appreciating how good the ground actually was and fishing more specifically.

We fished a spot exactly like this on Saturday morning, and it was about the wettest lure fishing session I can remember fishing for a good while. I still giggle when I recall a session around Tramore on the south coast of Ireland a good few years ago when it was so wet we ended up asking a bloke working in a petrol station where he minded us wadering up on the garage forecourt because it was undercover and out of the monsoon! It was that sort of wet on Saturday morning here in Cornwall, but the conditions were absolutely stunning.

And there were bass there, but there was also a ridiculous amount of weed. A few fish were landed, but you had to literally connect within the first few turns of the reel handle otherwise your lure was covered with bloody weed. It felt like there were a good few fish moving around but even surface lures were getting covered. This often happens in what might pass for summer around here - time to give up hoping for an actual summer? - and there are certain areas I tend to avoid until autumn because of this.

What has really struck me though the last couple of times I have fished this specific area is that I am now sort of seeing the whole area with a hugely increased sense of excitement, rather than just the couple of specific points where I have had good catches before. For some reason I can’t really explain, I have kinda “re-seen” the ground, and I can’t help but kick myself that I haven’t been fishing it a whole lot more and in different ways. It’s tucked out of the way and there seem to be various cutoff points with different states of the tide, but anywhere I see a lot of boulders I tend to get very excited - and there are a lot of boulders and gullies and so on. I’d love a good bit of summer if we are ever going to get one, but I am also looking forward to autumn and early winter when we lose a lot of the weed and I can get back to fishing where conditions suggest if that makes sense. This specific area is going to be getting a lot more attention from me for sure………..