Do you take much notice of water temperatures when your local bass fishing season is (or is not!) coming back to life after winter?

For the last couple of years I have kept pretty detailed notes on the first few months of bass fishing sessions but then I’ve tailed off and lost interest which I know is bloody stupid. I have vowed to myself that this year is going to be THE year when I keep up with various notes and information on each and every fishing session I do, but even when I was keeping some notes I didn’t record water temperatures. I have heard a number of bass anglers swear by their local water needing to hit a magical 10°C before their bass fishing kicks off, and whilst it sounds like a bit of a generalisation which doesn’t take into account various local anomalies (what’s the water temp in the Channel Islands for example when they catch good bass from the shore in January and into February?), I would never ignore any thinking like this when there are a lot of good bass anglers out there who know a hell of a lot more than me.……………

Then I got talking to a friend yesterday who is one of the most hard working and intelligent thinking bass anglers I know. We got to discussing water temperatures and what’s been happening and not happening on his bass fishing front, and it’s really interesting what he is seeing and how it can compare to little jumps in the water temperature. By no means am I saying that I ignored the whole water temperature thing because I do often look online to see what the figures are for say Plymouth, rather that it hasn’t really been much of a factor in my thinking for when each year kicks off around here. Give me nice conditions and I’m going to give it a go anyway, but why does a season seem to suddenly get going at a different time each year?

I got off the phone yesterday and immediately went to work trying to find historical water temperature data for Plymouth for the last few years and then specific days which I wanted to match up to either photos of fish I shot, or some of the sessions I did actually keep notes on. I found it in the end - here and then scroll down to “water temperature by month” and click on the blue highlighted links for the historical data. You can obviously search other areas than Plymouth in the search bar at the top of the page. I don’t know if it is the most accurate water temperature out there, but if I’m going to use a resource I need to pick one and stick with it. Last year was obviously a bit of an anomaly because with that first lockdown most of us started trying for bass later than we usually would have, but even so it’s still looking like this April we are in right now is seeing colder than normal sea water temperatures.

Going on this website then and the historical water temperatures for Plymouth, I had my first bass of 2019 at about 5am on 2nd April, and the water temperature was recorded at 10.2°C. On 2nd April this year (2021) the water temperature was 9.5°C and I did actually go out fishing that night in what were some good conditions for this location and which is somewhere I fancy finding my first bass of the season - and I blanked. Nearly one °C colder than two years ago on the same day. We had that first lockdown last year but even then I have looked at the temperatures and they were noticeably warmer than this year so far which sort of fries my brain because it didn’t feel like a particularly cold 2020/2021 winter for Cornwall down here. I am guessing though that there’s a whole lot more to water temperature fluctuations than what the weather feels like!

Mark and I then had a really good session with some good fish (and what I still think could have been the biggest open coast bass I have hooked in Cornwall which annoyingly came off) on the morning of 5th April 2019 when the water temperature in Plymouth was quoted as being 10.3°C. On 5th April this year (2021) the water temperature was 9.4°C which was actually a tiny bit colder than a few days before. We were fishing not a million miles away from that spot on 18th April this year and the water temp in Plymouth was 9.6°C. It’s interesting because early in April this year it felt like things were almost about to get going and then it’s been pretty bloody cold with persistent offshore winds for ages now. If you go looking at the water temperatures they dropped back down to 9°C on 8th April but are now on the rise again. Yesterday was 21st April and the water was a (balmy!) 9.9°C, but on the same day in 2019 it was 11.1°C and bass fishing had properly got going around here.

Going on my photos and bearing in mind that I don’t photograph a lot of the bass we might catch, I am pretty sure my first bass of 2017 was caught on 16th April when the water temp in Plymouth was an interesting 10.6°C. On 16th April 2021 the water temperature was 9.2°C, indeed during that week only a few days ago we had a frost every single morning here in Cornwall which didn’t feel right at all.

So these figures are obviously no more than a tiny snapshot, but at the very least it’s some food for thought and I am going to continue to examine specific dates when I get a bit more time. You can of course go looking for any number of reasons as to why fishing is good or bad or early or late and so on, and I would suggest that water temperature is only ever going to be one factor in a puzzle that as human beings we really don’t actually know a huge amount about. I don’t study different water temperatures around the UK and then when different parts of the country suddenly start throwing up bass to shore anglers, but I do wonder if a bit like the striper migration maps that these guys put up here, there might be some sort of correlation between certain water temps in different areas and bass “suddenly” being there. You all have a good weekend, my brain is currently churning around more than it normally is, and what I so love about fishing is who really knows………….