Four weeks of no fishing gets me thinking about my fishing a lot

My two girls’ A-Level and GCSE results this summer have put into stark contrast how crap my own A-Levels were, and how I didn’t exactly have many choices open to me if I wanted to have a crack at university many years ago now. To be honest though I only ever wanted to go to Plymouth University and I’d have gone there even if I had done really well at my A-Levels. Which I didn’t, but I wanted to be near the sea and go fishing as much as possible because I had the fishing bug really badly but I had never had saltwater fishing on my doorstep before. I gave up drinking when I was 18 so the whole pubs and clubs thing surrounding university held no appeal for me. I wanted to fish as much as possible and Plymouth University together with student loans etc. was the logical choice……………

By pure chance I had just the required grades to be accepted into the university, and from day one of arriving in Plymouth I knew I would never leave this part of the world. I loved living in the south west straight away. I know I was meant to be studying hard, but I literally fell on all that available fishing around me like a hungry bass. I didn’t find the university library until my second year, but I did literally walk every single mile of the south Devon coastline with a rope, spike, club hammer and OS Map.

Damn it was a big learning curve, and I remain eternally grateful to a lot of very kind local anglers who were so kind to a few of us “invasive” fishing junkie students, and especially towards me who came from the private school system and had no idea how the local sort of fishing life worked if that makes sense. They made us feel so at home and I never did leave this part of the world. I have been living around here for thirty years now, my girls were born in Derriford where I was with my heart attack the other day, and my wife and I love this part of the world more literally every day.

And of course the majority of my saltwater fishing was based around bait. For sure I slung a few artificial bits and pieces around in the odd attempt at pollack and whatever else might jump on the end, but such a big part of my fishing revolved around bait collection and management and so on. I always had peeler crabs in the fridge, and even in my university days I would have my own freezer in a student house for all the frozen bait I might need. But then lure fishing for bass came along and changed my fishing in a big way……………

So I haven’t been fishing for about a month now - it’s four weeks tomorrow since my heart attack - and aside from trying to stay nice and relaxed and do plenty of dog walking, I have naturally been thinking about a lot of things. I try my best not to dwell on how things could have gone so differently, because the way I think about what happened is this - aside from actually having a very severe heart attack, every single thing went my way four weeks ago and I got really lucky. I am not being remotely blase or smug because I expect my head to play tricks on me at some point, but for the time being I am getting on with recovering, being with my awesome family, and thinking a hell of a lot about fishing!

And yet again I go back to this - never in my wildest dreams did I imagine that there could be this much fun and interest and involvement based around chasing mainly one species of fish. For sure I’ll target wrasse and pollack on lures sometimes, but lure fishing for bass is what’s got me, and I don’t sense the hold over me easing off at all . Twenty years ago I’d have looked at an angler like me and would have thought how limiting it was to chase mainly the one species of fish, but twenty years ago I knew so little about bass. I had zero idea how versatile and fascinating the whole fishing for them with lures could be.

If bass fishing for me was say only banging out surface lures over rough shallow ground then it would be no different - for me - to banging out baits for cod and waiting for my rod tip to signal a bite. It wouldn’t be enough to keep me fully occupied. All fishing is fantastic and I don’t mean for one second to dismiss what I loved so much for so long, but by pure luck I kinda stumbled into lure fishing for bass. Then because I have a head which I can’t shut down I kinda stumbled further into the whole variety of lure fishing thing, and the fact that this one amazing species of fish can be chased in so many different ways and locations and times of the year and so on.

So for all my thinking about my fishing and where it’s going these past few weeks, it turns out that I am perfectly happy with where I’m at with it. I love doing it, I love being around, I love communicating with other bass anglers, I love communicating about it, and I seriously, seriously love photographing it. I had a few casts on Sunday morning with a couple of new rod samples I need to start evaluating, but I took it easy and I didn’t have anything bad happen to me. I did see a stack of feeding birds not too far away which I could have got at with a lure, but for once I did the sensible thing and I didn’t go chasing them. I could feel myself getting really excited and I thought it right to walk away and not elevate my heart rate too much! I’ve got a heart physio appointment on Thursday morning which I hope will tell me where I am at with my recovery, and how much more I can hopefully do. How can I con the monitors?