Fishing is meant to be such a relaxing thing to do, but do you ever come home with steam coming out of your ears? (ABITSIWALD)

The only person to bear witness to the stream of filthy language coming out of my mouth yesterday evening wasn’t even a person, but even so my sheepdog Storm looked shocked at how her owner was behaving. They say that in many respects going fishing is the ultimate in good vibes and positive thinking, but by the time I came off the beach at about 8.30pm I was bloody fuming……………

But why? How on earth could a surf fishing session drive an obsessed angler so mad when banging lures out in conditions like that is such fun? It is my firm belief that ABITSIWALD - Any Bass In The Surf Is Worth At Least Double - because of how they hit the lures and scrap in all that fizzed up water, and yesterday it was apparent very quickly that there were a lot of fish in front of me. I have stayed away from a lot of my local coastline for a while now because of the almost ridiculous amount of weed in the water, but with the forecast for yesterday afternoon and how things looked on the webcam I could no longer resist.

First cast with a 30g Surf Seeker rigged with the single hook and I hooked a bass. It wasn’t very big but ABITSIWALD and I was giggling away like a right loon. Second cast and I hit a load of weed but then I caught another bass on my third cast. Perhaps the weed isn’t as bad as it was a few weeks ago I told myself, but two and a half hours or so later and I gave in. I had five or six bass and I reckon those were genuinely the only “clean” casts I got the entire session. I tried every way of fishing that I could think of to try and get away from the weed because everything pointed to the surf being full of fish and who knows that might jump on the end when there’s a lot of bass around?

I wondered if bumping the bottom with a paddletail might be the answer, so I clipped on the Lemon Back 13cm/31g Sandeel V2 Weedless and if I hadn’t been properly holding onto my rod I seriously reckon it would have been pulled right out of my hands with how hard a bass hit me on the drop. I got so overexcited I missed the bloody fish - cue a load more swearing at myself for fishing like a tit - but perhaps this was the way to get from the bulk of the weed? A load of casts later and I’ve pulled in most of the weed in the sea and it very obviously wasn’t a very cunning plan. I am not proud of the language I was hurling at the sky as every single bloody cast went solid with weed, but at least Storm can’t repeat some of the things I was saying and my girls still think that dad is relatively clean-mouthed.

About the only conclusion I did come to last night is that I will take the cheaper SGS5 9’6’’ 12-46g rod over the slightly lighter and more subtle and more expensive SGS8 9’6’’ 12-46g rod for surf fishing. I was fishing with the newly announced silver coloured Penn Slammer IV 3500 DX which remains Shimano-smooth after a fair amount of getting splashed and dunked in the surf especially, and with how the cheaper SGS5 9’6’’ 12-46g rod bangs the heavier lures out there and has a degree less subtlety in the tip, this is without doubt my go-to surf rod these days. I have obviously given these rods a lot of time to arrive at this conclusion, but that exact setup now sits in my rack for surf fishing when there isn’t a horrible amount of weed around. If there hadn’t so obviously been a load of fish around yesterday I’d have been relatively calm, but I reckon you could have tracked the steam coming out of my ears from space when I was walking up the cliffs and back to my Epic Berlingo. By the time I finally managed to get to sleep last night, that bass which hit my Sandeel V2 Weedless on the drop was approaching frigging monster size!

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