Ever find yourself a bit undergunned because you underestimated the sea conditions?

I was all behind a rather cunning plan that a friend came up with the other day, but come the morning of the planned afternoon session I wasn’t a million miles off messaging for a change of plan because I wasn’t sure there’d be enough bounce on the sea for where we were going to fish. How wrong I was………..

Thanks to Dave from Labrax Mafia for the use of these photos of me fishing the other day

Give me the session all over again and I think I’d have taken one look at the sea when we got there and changed the plan to find some shelter. The benefit of hindsight and all that. This spot works best when the waves are dumping hard, but there’s hard and then there’s really hard. I knew within about five casts that I was going to struggle to effectively present lures where I needed to be presenting them - in the gutter. I was wearing those “budget” Kinetic X4 waist waders I blogged about the other day because you are never going to be wading out on this mark when there’s a big sea dumping, but when I got a couple of soakings I was rather wishing I’d been wearing a full pair of chest waders! There was nothing dangerous going on I might add - safety police alert from some of my Facebook “friends”! - but I didn’t stay very dry, put it that way.

That Dave and I came away with a small bass each plus a few bumps and misses was a result I was okay with considering the sea and how relatively undergunned we both were to effectively deal with it. No worries with the rods and reels and so on, and I caught my small bass on the larger 13cm/33g Savage Gear Sandeel V2 Weedless, but in all honesty I should have had something like a heavier 15.5cm/46g J-hook Savage Gear Sandeel V2 to more effectively cope with how I needed to present a lure in so much turbulence - or something equivalent of course, but with how much I trust these lures I will naturally turn to them. And yes, if I was in charge of development there would be a 15.5cm/46g version of the Sandeel V2 Weedless on the market!

I carry two lure boxes with me, and because I am experimenting a bit with how I carry my lures when I’m fishing, I have been sometimes been using the “Short” Savage Gear washable lure box together with the larger 25.5cm HTO Double Latch box (I have Araldited those removable dividers in place), as per the photo above. When I am going fishing I have a think about where I am planning to go and then change or add certain hard and soft lures depending on what I already know about the ground and the sea or wind conditions I am expecting. I got it wrong the other day, so when you land a fish and bump a couple you can’t help but wonder what else might have been around if you had been able to more effectively present your lure in the kill zone. I’m no expert and I will never try and pretend to be. I got it a bit wrong the other day and I will learn from the experience. You all have a good weekend………..

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