Everything you can think of looks perfect but you blank - do we really have a clue?
On Wednesday morning I had a look at a local webcam and got a rather nice surprise - the sea conditions looked really rather lovely. With the size of the tide I had a mark in my head to fish over the HW, and when Steve and I got out there we even found that it was really misty and murky which I really like for bass around here. I did the computing in my head and I couldn’t think of a single thing about the conditions and tides and location which didn’t seriously float my boat for a few bass. We apply what we believe is human logic, but on the flipside we are chasing creatures which as far as I am aware act purely on whatever instinct is baked into their very being…………..
And we blanked. When I mean blanked, Steve had one hit from a fish but that was it, and I’m talking about a session when I’d have put money on us catching at least a bass. In a perfect world I’d have preferred a tiny bit more sea with a slightly different shape of wave, but that’s splitting hairs because I am naturally basing what I want at this mark from what it has been like when I have caught bass here - and I have caught bass here in conditions I’d have classed as somewhat less ideal than what we found on Wednesday morning. In essence we had what I would call perfect conditions for where we were fishing, and via recent experience we know that bass have been coming out of here - because we have caught them! Hell, there was even very little weed around as well.
So I come away from a blank like that and I wrack my brain for a logical reason as to why we blanked. You know that with the way my head works I can come up with any number of what I think are entirely plausible explanations, with my skills or indeed lack of skills as an angler having to come into play of course. On Wednesday morning I fished as I would tend to do on this mark, as in I can cover the exact parts of the mark I have caught bass from with the same lures I have caught on in the past. When it becomes apparent that the session isn’t going to (human) plan I then mix things up a bit to include a particular lure which a mate has been doing well on down there recently - the 11.5cm/22g lemon back Sandeel V2 Weedless. But we blanked when I would have bet my entire lure collection that we’d have caught.
My go-to bass fishing lures
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My go-to bass fishing lures ///
Was there no food around for the bass to be in there feeding on? There seems to be a hell of a lot of bait around at the moment, so were the bass which might have been hardwired to patrol this particular mark at a particular time on the hunt for food been preoccupied somewhere else where there was food? Did we quite simply fish the wrong sizes or types of lures for any bass which might have been in there but could have been feeding on something else which we were not remotely imitating? And so on and so on until my head is fit to burst with potential reasons why we blanked when I (wrongly) thought that every single thing was in our favour. Anybody who never blanks for bass is talking crap in my book, but also in that book I include those anglers who spout “definites” like they actually know - because we don’t. How on earth can we know when we are trying to apply what we believe is human logic to creatures which don’t share our abilities for rational thought and can surely act only on what we would think of as instinct? (let’s not get into the state of the world right now and how so many people seem to hate other people when you might have understandably thought that the collective misery of the global pandemic would have brought us closer together, but hey ho, we are human beings and we think logically). You all have a good weekend. Bloody hell I miss my dad, and I have no problem admitting to him not being around anymore hitting me hard sometimes…………..