Easy to get locked into your localised bass fishing bubble, when in fact things can be so different all around the UK and Europe

It is my opinion that one of the most exciting ways to catch bass is when you’re standing in a raging surf and smashing metals out into a decent headwind. I personally find it hard to beat the hit and the scrap that these perfectly wonderful fish can give when the water is all white and green and full of fizz and bounce…………….

Then I speak to and start learning a bit about the bass fishing around say the Morecambe Bay area where I was over the weekend, and I realise that local bass anglers are never going to bash stuff out into a raging surf. They have got some incredible bass fishing, and I kept hearing how smoothounds are almost a plague-fish because there are so many of them these days!, but from what little I saw it could not be more different than most of the bass fishing I might do around me. The local anglers are fishing some fascinating ground, but it’s very different from what I would mostly experience.

And it’s why I always slightly caveat what I read and learn from other anglers. Damn right I want to learn as much about bass fishing as possible, but we obviously have no choice than to base our learnings and understanding upon where we fish the most ourselves. There are some very good anglers out there, and some of them choose to kindly share a lot of information via social media, magazine articles, books, blogs, podcasts, guiding and so on, but for all the amazing information we can increasingly access these days, that information is always going to be somewhat localised. It has to be. We learn from what we do. Speculation in my opinion is not helpful information.

There will always be localised things going on which might be somewhat unique to specific areas. Some anglers travel around and will take those methods and try them in different areas, indeed it has always fascinated me how fishing techniques and information “travel” as such. I would hope that any of you kind people who read this blog will have worked out a long time ago that my bass fishing “knowledge” has to be based mostly upon where I go fishing myself. For sure I might get around more than most anglers because of my work, and I get to fish with a wide range of anglers as well - which in turn I hope helps to broaden my outlooks - but for all my loving fishing for bass in the surf for example, I would have a pretty good guess that a lot of you here will have never targeted bass like this because you don’t have any surf beaches nearby.

The UK might well be a pretty small country on a global scale, but even with this one amazing species of fish there is an incredible amount of regional diversity when it comes to terrain and methods and so on. I had no idea for example that a lure I tend to use mainly as a surf fishing lure - the Savage Gear Seeker or Surf Seeker - is in fact one of the best selling bass lures in the very impressive Gerry’s Fishing tackle shop in Morecambe, an area that doesn’t have any surf beaches like I might do here in Cornwall. Same lure then, and the same target species, but very different terrains, indeed the little bit I saw reminded me a bit of how a lot of the Scandinavians go about their coastal sea trout fishing - covering as much shallow water as possible because the fish could be so spread out in such a massive area (I also dread to think how scary and dangerous it would be to get caught out on a rapidly flooding tide in Morecambe Bay if you don’t know what you are doing).

Judging by the lures on the shelves in Gerry’s, the Savage Gear Sandeel V2 and the Westin Sandy Andy are also seriously popular with local anglers up there, and white is definitely the most popular colour. There are numerous estuaries which drain into the massive Morecambe Bay, and from a good few conversations it sounds like targeting bass in these often muddy estuary mouths throws up a lot of good bass to local anglers. I can easily find the need for a 9’6’’ or 10’ lure rod rated up to around 45g for when open coast conditions get a bit hectic on my local coastline for example, but I can’t see much need or traction for rods like that where I have just spent the weekend. If there is one thing I love to do it’s to spend time talking to different anglers around the country or the world, and wow it doesn’t half get the brain bouncing away with ideas for techniques and lures and so on…………….

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