Do you ever think about those gaps (periods) between the waves, and how they might impact your fishing?

Back in my bait days when I did so much fishing from the rocks I don’t remember giving a whole lot of thought to what I guess we could call the shape of the sea. For sure I was always looking for certain wind directions or wind strengths and tides and so on, but I don’t recall obsessing about swell periods or wave heights and so on………………

When we had a bunch of bass the other day I reckon the shape of the sea was just about perfect for where we ended up fishing. We had a shorter swell period which I hope you can just about tell from the photo above, where the red lines are showing where I happen to think the bass are most likely to be in conditions like that. The wind was onshore, the waves were much choppier because the period between each breaking wave was less, and there weren’t those massive surging tables of white water that a pure swell as such tends to create on the shallower beaches. I really like shorter seas and onshore winds for a lot of my bass fishing, but of course I accept that your experiences may well vary depending on where you live and/or fish.

Look at another photo from the same session and you can quite clearly see the sort of areas Andy here is going to be targeting. You’re not going to be standing really close to the sea but it’s perfectly safe if you keep an eye on things. When you have boulders like that I guess most anglers are going to want to target the water close in rather than bang stuff out to the horizon, but to be fair I did have yet another go with Andy’s newish lure rod - why oh why do I do it to myself? - and hooked a bass at range on one of those 40g Savage Gear 3D Jig Minnow casting jigs (I do wish there was also a 30g version to go with the 20g and 40g ones). The fish broke off because there was an undiscovered wind knot further down the spool and the braid broke on it pretty quickly after I hooked the bass. Bloody hell I do wish though that I could get this particular APIA rod out of my head!

I really wanted to go fishing on Sunday because the forecast was looking so good, but it was my turn to take our youngest girl to one of the many cross country running events she does during the winter. I fully admit to checking a few webcams and wrecking my head while we were up at a very muddy Exeter cross country venue, and my mate Mark did get out and he nailed a few bass. The wind was onshore and the conditions I believe were very much like the two photos above.

We got out on Monday though, but it was all a bit different out there. The wind had gone offshore and there was what I think of as a pure swell rolling in - no onshore winds to help create messy waves and then chop it all up, just decent size waves rolling in with longer swell periods (times between the breaking waves). Much better for surfing but not so good for fishing in my book. In turn this creates those really big, surging tables of white water, and I don’t personally think that bass respond that well to those big tables of white water which is often mixed up with a lot of sand. Do fish not like all that sand swirling around because it messes with their gills? I hope the photo above gives you an idea of those big tables of white water rolling around, and the rough area within that oval is kind of where I don’t really want to be fishing but the conditions give me little choice. Photos can’t do justice to heavy conditions and we had to keep a very close eye on things and get the hell out of the way of some of the much larger sets rolling in and smashing into the coastline.

Another view of those big tables of surging white water is above. Mark did land a bass from just beyond the white water, but we struggled and I ended up kicking myself a bit because I think I made the wrong decision on where to go fishing on Monday morning. To be fair we would have struggled at a lot of spots with the size of the swell rolling in, but you can still beat yourself up from time to time. It’s no great problem presenting lures like some of the heavier Savage Gear Sandeel V2 or Fiiish Black Minnows etc. in conditions like that, but I personally feel that shorter swell periods give me much better bass fishing opportunities on the open coast. Yep, I spend far too much time keeping a very close eye on something like the Surfline app (I believe they bought Magic Seaweed and absorbed it), and then making various plans together with what seems to be very changeable wind forecasts. I have been checking Surfline together with XCWeather on my iPhone this morning for example, and I rather fancy a quick open coast session before the winds are forecast to get that bit too strong onshore and potentially blow things out for a while…………………

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