Happy New Year, an epic first fishing session of 2023 - in terms of the light and conditions but sadly not the fish!

A very Happy New Year to each and every one of you kind souls who take the time to read this blog, interact with me, and from time to time choose to buy some of your fishing tackle via my affiliate links. Thank you as always. I hope you all had a good Christmas and I’m guessing that most of you are back to work or school and so on by now. My two girls are back to school this morning and my wife is back teaching so it’s me and Storm in the house and it’s all quiet again……………..

I have most likely bored a lot of people with my banging on about how much I like the winter bass fishing here in Cornwall, but underlying my looking forward to it each year is the worry that the next winter could be one of those winters when it all goes a bit wrong. This winter seems to be one of those winters! I can remember leaving my last guiding trip in Kerry back in October last year and talking with our lads about how much I was looking forward to November and December and even into January - but how wrong I was. Apart from a very select few days of decent bass lure fishing conditions around here, for the most part it seems to have been blowing a gale and raining ever since I got back. Or we are getting a decent cold snap and I wonder at times if the bass are confused as we are! But we are anglers and we continue to dream and hope that the wind forecast on my XCWeather app can’t really be true or that the coastline is magically going to clear up and allow us to target those specific locations which tend to work well at the time of year. I know where I want to be and when, but I can’t control the weather.

For various family related reasons it was only my youngest girl and I here at home on the Bank Holiday Monday, and surprisingly the weather was almost magically wonderful with how good it felt to see the sun in a big blue sky again. I walked Storm early with my headlamp on while the teenager caught up on some sleep, and then after breakfast we decided to head for the coast and go for a decent dog walk. The fact that when we got back from that walk my youngest girl then went out for a 10km run with the dog is beside the point - I think she might genuinely be gone in the head with how much she loves running - because it was when we were driving back along the top of the beach that the world looked so glorious I decided I had to go fishing in the afternoon. I waited for the youngest girl to get back with Storm so I could grab the dog for my fishing. The dog doesn’t know it but sometimes we almost timetable her into the various activities we all want her for!

The actual waves and sea state looked pretty good, but the water clarity was seriously less than ideal and we tend to get a lot of weed in the water when it goes bad around here. It was due to blow up nasty again yesterday - it did! - so I thought what the hell and made a decision on where to go based on a state of tide and what looked like (marginally) the best water clarity to me. I gave my mate Mark a shout and asked if he was up for it, even if we did have a very high chance of blanking. You never quite know though. I just wanted to get out and enjoy some more of the warm sunshine, plus I had an ulterior motive in that I wanted to start thrashing another of these new Penn Conflict Elite rods I have got hold of, the 9’6’’ 6-32g (wow, I know I like the word “sharp” for lure rods, but this thing is the very definition of that word, reviews of some of these rods will start appearing soon).

And sure enough we blanked, but for a glorious couple of hours we were fishing in good sea conditions, and with how the water was swirling around I still felt we were in with a shout even if the clarity was what I would class as seriously suspect. I couldn’t have cared less about the distinct lack of bass though, because I got to thrash a new rod and the light went absolutely frigging loopy for a while. My eternal thanks as always to Mark for so kindly fishing with the Penn rod at times so I could shoot some photos, plus I also managed to get some basic shots of me fishing with the rod as well. No bass were caught, but if fishing was about catching fish and nothing else I’d have given up a long time ago. You don’t know how much I love it when a location and sea state comes together like that with some seriously good light, so for the first (blank) fishing session of 2023 I am buzzing like you would not believe. So many plans and ideas for the year ahead, so many more places to check out, may plenty of good fish inhale your lures and flies and bait in the coming months…………….

Disclosure - If you buy anything using links found around my website, I may make a commission. It doesn’t cost you anymore to buy via these affiliate links - and please feel entirely free not to do so of course - but it will help me to continue producing content. Thank you.