Give me the excitement of fishing green, fizzed up water all day long (especially when there are sample rods that need thrashing)

I had made a plan to meet up with Ben from the Art of Fishing tackle shop on Monday morning, to try and get ahead of the weather that is currently raging outside. Ben has a new prototype rod he wanted to test in a real fishing situation, and I’ve got a bunch of sample rods here as well which I am putting through their paces. I did have a cunning plan to fish somewhere else for an hour or two before Ben could meet me, but one look out the back early in the morning and then a sniff at a few webcams and swell forecasts and I pretty quickly binned that early idea. I knew we would find bouncy conditions, but it would have been far too much for the early plan……………

Even after deleting my early plan I arrived before Ben at our chosen location to find a lot of sea rolling in. It was fishable, but the surges meant I could not get anywhere close to the water until the tide stripped out a whole lot more and opened up access to where I really wanted to fish. Which it did in due course, but there was a hell of a lot of broken up weed in the water and we didn’t really find much properly fishable water until way down the tide. The actual fishing wasn’t remotely epic, but damn I do love fishing water like you can see in these photos - green, fizzed up, lots of bounce, nice short sea, every single cast you feel like you might be into a fish (if only the bloody weed would sod off that is!). I love all types of lure fishing for bass, but the bouncy version really gets me going. Ben managed a bass on a 14g cheb head rigged 15cm Savage Gear Slender Scoop Shad on the 6/0 weedless hook we did for the Gravity Sticks, and on the same setup I had a fish come almost right out of the water as it tried to grab the lure as I lifted it out for another cast.

So the sea conditions were more exciting than the actual fishing turned out to be, but I got to properly thrash a couple of sample rods with all manner of different lures, and Ben brought along his prototype which to be honest I wish I had never seen. I am first on the list now, put it that way. Do I need a new lure rod? Let’s not go there on a wet and windy Wednesday morning! Ben very kindly gave me a spool of some new braid from Gosen he has recently got in. Called “Roots”, it’s an 8-strand braid which in the hand feels very nice, and I believe the prices are rather sensible as well. I have been fishing a lot recently with the newish Sufix 91 braid - review to come - and yet again I am left wondering how Sufix keep making such awesome mainlines. Like lure rods, braids are very subjective, and this Gosen Roots braid could be rather interesting as well.

Before my heart attack I was banging on about playing around with various cheb heads/weights and rigging the SG Slender Scoop Shads especially with them. I have got various ideas on how certain things might be modified for ease of use in the future, but for the time being I am putting a 7mm split ring on the front of one of our 6/0 weedless hooks (with no belly-weight, thank you again to that kind angler who commented on here about the split ring thing a while back) and then attaching whatever weight of cheb head I think is necessary to the split ring. It might look a touch cumbersome, but it works, it’s easy to chop and change the cheb head, and you know how much I like a weedless hook with a corkscrew. I want any soft plastic I use to last as long as possible.

What is more and more noticeable is just how versatile this cheb-rigging the Slender Scoop Shad is when it comes to effectively coping with different conditions and situations. Somebody on one of my Facebook posts made reference to how badly a cheb-rigged soft plastic casts, but I am finding the exact opposite, and especially when the weight of the actual cheb head starts to be around or more than the weight of the lure itself. With how the ground exposes on the ebb tide where we were fishing on Monday morning, I could find myself fishing straight into the surf, into holes and gullies with the sea rolling in at me, and then sometimes I’d be sideways on to where I wanted to present a lure, with the waves coming from the side. Apart from needing to test a bunch of different types and weights of lures on the sample rods, for the most part I tackled those bouncy conditions with a 14g Vike tungsten cheb head to the 15cm Slender Scoop Shad (I bought my Vike stuff here if that helps, it’s not an affiliate link, and be warned, this website is like a rabbit hole!). I also really like how the cheb head setup fishes when you have enough water to put a sink and draw on the lure, then bumping it along the bottom also works well. The one thing that messed up a lot of good plans was the amount of weed though!

I didn’t know until relatively recently that Savage Gear sell a tungsten “Cheb Head Kit”, so when I found out I got hold of one. I haven’t worked out whether the number of tungsten cheb heads in the kit (from 3g to 10g, I really like the baby 11cm Slender Scoop Shad on a 4/0 weedless hook and a 3g tungsten cheb head) work out as good value for money, but it’s a handy kit. I’d bin the supplied weedless hooks for any kind of saltwater fishing. Damn it feels good to be out fishing and taking photographs and slow-jogging 5k routes to keep myself below a certain heart rate but help get back to where I was. I am taking none of this for granted………………

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