Do you tend to concentrate on specific parts of the water column if and when you chase bass on lures at night?

A bloke I know who happens to be a very good bass angler told me a while back how he catches a lot of his best bass at night by working various soft lures I believe along the bottom, and it really struck home to me how I don’t tend to target bass like this at night. If I think back to when night lure fishing for bass became a staple part of my armoury, and then I think of the bass I have caught or seen caught, I reckon nearly all of them have come on soft and hard lures which are being retrieved either near to, just under, or essentially on the surface because of the retrieve speed…………..

A big bass caught at night on a white senko fished very near the surface

And because it’s nearly February it’s that time of year when I can’t help but think about these kinds of things and then start making plans for the rest of the year. I am not interested in standing still with my fishing and I will always listen to and take on board what good anglers are kind enough to talk to me about. Night lure fishing became a thing for me over in Ireland at first, and that was mainly down to a mate who encouraged me to properly have a go at it with a white senko on a simple and relatively fast straight retrieve. The lure and the method of fishing it (as per the video below, whack it out and wind it in, nice and simple) worked very quickly for me so it was only natural that the more bass I started catching at night towards the upper parts of the water column, the more I concentrated on fishing like this.

So my night lure fishing for the most part tends to be based around fishing various soft and hard lures which swim very shallow based on what kind of retrieve I am using. One good bass I hooked and lost a few years ago has always stuck with me though. A kind local angler invited me out for a night fishing session which actually turned out to be a bit of a bust because there was too much weed in the water, so to try and counteract the fact I couldn’t properly fish say a white senko or DoLive Stick or needlefish and so on, I clipped on a Fiiish Black Minnow and thought what the hell let’s give it a go. We were fishing over a shallowish reef and on my first or second cast I hooked what felt like a really good bass on the drop. The fish came off but of course the memory remains, and it ties in with what the bloke I referred to at the top of the blog post was talking to me about. I will tend to fish a DoLive Stick at night on a slowish retrieve for example, when I know the lure is just underneath the surface and doing its seductive little wiggle, but a lad I know over in Ireland has done really well by fishing the same lure far slower than me and he is convinced that it’s essentially swimming along or just above the bottom.

There are plenty of you reading this blog post who have a whack load more experience than me with lure fishing for bass at night, but it is my firm belief that bass are picking up on lures in the dark just as efficiently/easily as they are during daylight hours. Whether they are seeing or feeling our lures or whatever it actually is, at the speed I am fishing certain lures at night I just don’t believe these magnificent fish are having any issues at all with finding our lures in the dark - but do we get stuck on specific ways of fishing with our chosen lures because it’s worked for us before and no doubt it will work for us again? For many years now I have quite happily bumped various soft plastics rigged on jig heads down various runs of current over in Ireland especially, and I really like working shallowish reefs with weedless paddletails especially (thanks as ever to a couple of north coast lads for helping switch me onto this) - so why don’t I fish more like this at night? How I tend to night fish seems to work perfectly well at times, and I have seen some serious bass caught over the last few years via other anglers fishing just like me, but just because working the upper parts of the water column can work well doesn’t mean it might also be worth spending time working lures along the bottom - and vice versa I might add. Nothing floats by boat more in fishing than trying something a bit different to what I might usually do and getting it to work. Food for thought perhaps?

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