Got back home, first fishing session and I hooked a bass on my second cast - itch scratched!

I absolutely love the guiding work I do with John Quinlan over in Ireland, and as much as I am perfectly happy with not fishing and instead trying to help our anglers catch fish and learn a bit more about lure fishing, I do literally and physically need to fish. I got back to an empty house on Monday evening - eldest girl miles away at uni and wife/youngest girl in the Isle of Wight seeing the in-laws - and then I had an online heart rehabilitation thing on Tuesday morning where after the session I managed to negotiate a higher average heart rate for my running. Result!

And then it was time to go fishing. If there are fishing gods then they must have forgiven me for my numerous transgressions with the weather related punishment they dealt us at times out in Kerry. Yesterday I got every single thing I wanted - perfect tide, just the right amount of bounce thanks to just the right amount of onshore wind, lovely green water, minimal weed, overcast conditions (it ended up lamping it down), and nobody else around. And a bunch of bass.

To be perfectly honest everything looked so good I was surprised not to get hit on my first cast back home. But I did get walloped on my second cast as I retrieved the soft plastic through such a wonderfully bouncy bit of sea, and as I went to unhook a lovely chunky Cornish bass around the 3lb mark I couldn’t help but grab a look skywards and see if the fishing gods were indeed sneaking a peak at this grinning, middle-aged, long-haired loon standing on a rock with a fishing rod in his hand. Goddam it felt good to be into a fish again, and a few casts later I got smacked again and dropped a slightly bigger bass at my feet. I then landed a very small fish but in time the gully I was fishing seemed to go quiet so I started to move around because there is a lot of ground to cover where I was fishing yesterday afternoon.

I caught a few bass on a cheb-rigged 13cm Slender Scoop Shad, and over a fair amount of fishing time now with this setup I have found that a 10g tungsten cheb weight with the 13cm size Slender Scoop Shad on a 6/0 weedless hook (no belly-weight) is a good combination for casting distance and grip when there is good bounce on the sea. It allows me to punch the soft plastic out there into a bit of breeze, and on a straight retrieve I am not hitting the bottom in what I might call regular depth water. 10g is also just about heavy enough to fish the lure with a bit of a sink and draw if you want to. Give me calmer conditions and/or shallower water and I will tend to change to a 7g or maybe 5g tungsten cheb weight, but 10g still allows me to fish the 13cm Slender Scoop Shad nice and shallow if I hold my rod tip up and need a bit of extra weight to punch into wind. I can’t prove that cheb-rigging the Savage Gear Slender Scoop Shad is any better than fishing it with a regular belly-weight weedless hook, but I do like the versatility and added belly-roll when using cheb weights like this. I also know that bass respond very well to it.

The camera went away after this, it lamped it down!

At one point yesterday afternoon I saw a bunch of birds starting to get pretty excited almost within casting range. I never, ever do not have some way of maximising the water I can cover if need be, and whilst it’s usually going to be a (metal) Savage Gear Seeker or Surf Seeker for me, it might well be something different for you. If Savage Gear/Pure Fishing deemed me surplus to requirements tomorrow I would still make sure I had at least a couple of different Seekers in each and every one of my washable lure boxes, and yesterday it paid off. They were generally smaller bass but when you have been guiding and not fishing for a few weeks they are all very welcome! For most of the session it properly pissed it down yesterday afternoon but I didn’t care at all. I am lucky to still be here, and although going fishing is quite simply what most of us here love to do, without a doubt it’s feeling an extra bit special these days. I refuse to take something so “normal” for granted……………

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