Ever seen a decent mullet taken fair and square on a surface lure?

I am pretty sure I hadn’t until yesterday morning when Steve had one of those surface takes you almost hear more than see because it’s so aggressive. I raced for my camera when I saw his rod go over, fully expecting to see a decent bass coming in, but as Steve started to drag the fish through the extensive bladderwrack in front of us, he turned to me and said it was a mullet. Now I’ve foul-hooked a few myself when lure fishing, but for the life of me I can’t remember seeing one taken fair and square in the mouth on a surface lure. It was a decent mullet as well, as per below. Steve was fishing with the Z-Claw surface lure and he also had a few bass on it as well. I can’t actually remember the last time I saw one of these lures, but I do remember how much a lot of the French anglers raved about them.

I had a situation yesterday morning where it felt like I was almost writing Monday’s blog post about changing down to smaller lures while I was actually fishing. Off the edges of the bladderwrack I was getting a number of swirls but no actual hits from bass on my Pop Walker 2.0 11.5cm surface lure (the Savage Gear Pop Walker 2.0 is a redone, and to me, much better version of the original Pop Walker, it’s far more stable and it casts like a frigging missile, a bunch of different sizes/lengths available), so I changed down to a smaller 9cm version of the same lure and bang, my first cast with it and the bass below smashed the lure.

Obviously that’s only one angler fishing and changing lures, but with the size of the bait which is in the estuary at the moment and which the birds and a lot of mackerel and small bass are going loopy on, it kinda makes sense the fish might be dialled in on small stuff at the moment. We are obviously never going to really know when we are chasing fish which to the best of my knowledge are acting purely on instinct which has been baked into their DNA over who knows how many thousands of years, but fishing doesn’t half keep me interested with thinking and planning.

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