Give me the wind in my face all day long, it’s a strong crosswind I find the trickiest to deal with (green water and bass, result!)

I am guessing that a lot of you here fish a lot of shallow, very broken ground at least some of the time for bass. Hell, if you had to describe a fish that was literally designed to haunt terrain like this then the bass would be right up there, just like bonefish seem to be perfectly designed to inhabit shallow sand flats. I went out fishing for a quick session yesterday afternoon thanks largely to a mate who was out working and let me know that he saw some half-decent green water………….

A lot of the coastline around me is getting a proper hammering at the moment, and it doesn’t take a huge amount to colour things up and fill with weed. I wasn’t planning to go fishing yesterday and I was working away quite happily - okay, so I did watch England teach India how to play T20 cricket in the World Cup semi-final in the morning! - but when a text came through to say from a mate to say that he seen some green water not a million miles away? I couldn’t resist, and especially because a brand new rod arrived for a thrashing yesterday morning, the Penn Conflict Elite 9’6’’ 8-45g (I have fished loads with the shorter 9’ 7-38 g version, review to come, the new range will be in shops very soon). I have fished a little bit not far from where my mate was on about, but the actual reef system where he saw good water is new to me and I was going to have to make it up as I went along. It was my youngest girl’s 16th birthday yesterday so I wasn’t going to have long (lovely slice of birthday cake!), plus it was my turn to take her to endurance running training over in Plymouth last night.

So I decided to fish the early flood tide and see what happened. The water was fairly green as my mate said it was (thank you!), and because of the shape of the reef and the way it lies, I was going to be fishing a mixture of straight into a pretty fresh south west wind and also with that wind almost right across me at times. As I said, I don’t know this particular reef but I liked the look of all that bouncing white water washing around a lot of structure and gullies and little bits of current produced by the turbulence. It wasn’t the sort of reef where you would do a lot of banging a lure out and reeling it straight back in without having to think about where your mainline was in relation to lots of rocks sticking out of the water and so on. You know exactly the sort of ground I am describing.

Within about ten minutes I had a good swirl but no hit on a Patchinko. It never ceases to amaze me how well this surface lure quite literally grips the surface of the water when you’ve got a healthy crosswind doing its best to grab your mainline and mess the lure action up (have you noticed how the lure is designed to deliberately fish nose-down on the retrieve?). I had a few more chucks with the Patchinko but with where I was standing I had a strong crosswind and it wasn’t at all easy to control my mainline in amongst all that structure and keep a surface lure working properly. As much as a hard lure like the Hound Glide might be a go-to sub-surface lure of mine for bouncy conditions, I was fishing shallow ground and I needed something shallower swimming with a bit of grip.

So I went back to my rucksack, dug out the heaviest belly-weight hook I own - a Berkley Fusion 7/0 11g - and rigged it up with the 15cm Slender Scoop Shad. If you can get this combination out there then I would suggest that over shallow ground there ain’t many conditions when this specific mix of hook and soft plastic isn’t going to keep you fishing AND help prevent your braid mainline wrapping around some nice sharp rocks when you’ve got that sidewind. The grip on these Slender Scoop Shads really is quite something. Storm was watching me intently because I know she prefers me fishing with surface lures which she loves to watch coming in, so I offered up a quick apology and got back to the edge of the rocks.

Now the bass above is hardly going to break any records, but damn it made my afternoon. A new mark, a fishing session I hadn’t planned, a specific part of a great big reef system that I had chosen to fish because this little section looked so good, a deliberate lure change to cope with the crosswind, and bang, bass very much on. I kept moving around the reef and had one more sharp bang but no connection on the same lure and hook combination, and eventually after a bit of wandering I got to a section of reef where I would be fishing directly into the south west wind. I really like this for the actual bass fishing itself, and also because my mainline isn’t getting pushed to the side all the time and I can fish more specific little bits without needing to take account of mainline crossing over rocks sticking out of the water etc.

I could have easily carried on fishing with the same lure, but I like chopping and changing to keep on learning about how different lures or methods work or don’t work so well in very specific conditions. I don’t know if any of you have come across these new Savage Gear Gravity Shallow lures yet, but I got some input into them with this lad Markos I do a fair bit of work with now. I was a bit worried when I saw the first samples of these lures because their shape looked pretty similar to those killer IMA iBorn lures (I love the 98F version), but I do know how Markos got to the shape of the Gravity Shallow. He designed an interesting little lure a while back which I don’t see much in the UK, the Savage Gear Gravity Pencil, and I know how much he loves this little lure. When I said to Markos way back that I was after a very long-casting shallow-diving hard lure which would also grip pretty damn well into bouncier conditions, Markos went to the shape of the Gravity Pencil and how it really holds well - and came up with the Gravity Shallow.

You know how much I like smaller lures, and I especially like the 10cm Gravity Shallow firstly as a shallow-diver, and secondly as easily one of the grippiest shallow-diving hard lures I know about. I won’t bore you with all the design details which are part of these lures, but the combination of small lip and high body sides really aids in helping these Gravity Shallow lures “bite” into slightly rougher seas than you might tend to fish a regular shallow-diver. Both the 10cm/14g and 11.5cm/20g versions cast really well, but into a strongish headwind like I ended up fishing into yesterday, the smaller 10cm/14g one cuts particularly well into it.

And the Mullet coloured 10cm/14g Gravity Shallow produced a bass for me yesterday afternoon (Markos’s lure colours are awesome!), not long before I needed to pack up and be on my way back home. Not exactly an epic bass session in terms of numbers or size, but I was over the moon to be fishing such good water when the weather is seriously not playing ball at all at the moment. A serious weekend of sport coming up, bring it on, not sure I can take much more of the men’s England rugby but come on the girls in their World Cup final tomorrow morning! You all have a good weekend and I will catch you next week……………

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