Have you ever known two consecutive years to fish the same?

The more I like to think I might know about this fishing thing, the more I realise that actually I am still mainly scrabbling around in the dark while I look for answers to questions which I don’t think I will ever find the answers to. When we took the dog out for a walk at 6am this morning I saw a bit of frost on the windscreen of my Epic Berlingo, and this in turn causes me to start thinking about the end of the year, how long we might have left at the bass fishing around here, and what might happen next year……………

And on the fishing front I might add. Where we will be as a species who live together on this planet I would suggest has rarely been more up in the air, but at least those of us who have fishing have something which enables us to bury our heads in the sand for a few hours while we keep on trying to get one over on Mother Nature. Mark and I went out fishing yesterday morning after we had taken the decision not to actually make a plan but instead to go and see if we could find feeding birds. For all that wild (offshore) weather over the weekend, my local coastline is as flat and clear as you like, indeed save for the frost on my windscreen this morning it doesn’t really feel like the end of November at all.

We did eventually find some feeding birds around the mouth of the Tamar, but it was quickly apparent that it was small mackerel working the bait and driving it to the surface which in turn of course attracts the birds. I managed to winkle out a couple of okay size mackerel for my lot to eat, but all the other ones we tried not to catch were really small and looked like perfect bass food - which we didn’t catch I might add. Everything suggested that there surely had to be bass somewhere around mackerel of that sort of size, but we couldn’t find them and in due course we knocked it on the head and headed for home. The rest of my day involved chainsawing up a load of branches which came down on Friday night and Saturday morning, and then dragging them to a big bonfire I got going.

I did have some bass the other day in an estuary which I have categorically never fished this late for them, but to be fair to myself I would suggest that in a “normal” year my local estuaries are pretty much blown by now with so much freshwater from the rain - which we currently are not getting, and yes I know, that’s the kiss of death for sure! The Tamar for example holds some really big bass in the winter which the odd flounder or cod angler sometimes catch, but for lure fishing I have always shied away from estuaries when they get really mucky and much colder as well from all that freshwater - which as I said we aren’t currently getting. I took a punt the other day and I was almost as shocked to catch a few bass as the bass presumably were when their food source that afternoon ended up being a lure with a hook in it.

I think back to how slow things were to get going earlier this year, but I couldn’t really compare it to the year before because we had that lockdown and couldn’t go fishing until a time when I’d sort of expect things to have got going around here in a “normal” year anyway. I know we got all that really cold weather in April this year, but I don’t remember thinking that last winter was a particularly cold one for around here - yet we got that late start and for a fair while it seemed like things might never kick off at all. But they did, and in no time it all felt back to like things should be, yet here we are now at the end of November and on the bass fishing front I am not quite sure how things feel.

What I really need and indeed would like is some onshore conditions to get my local coastline bouncing a bit. This is when we have tended to do pretty well later in the year around here, and whilst I will probably be regretting asking for some south and south west winds when only a few years ago we completely lost November and December’s bass fishing to the weather, I remain absolutely convinced that we get a lot more north west winds than we used to. If I was granted one wind direction to banish forever it would be north west, but yet again the forecast is looking like north west winds for most of the week around here. If I could get southerly winds say F4-6 for a few days then I feel like I might get a proper sense of what’s going on out on the coast from the bass fishing point of view. There seems to be plenty of bait around, I’ve got a lot of sample fishing tackle which needs testing, and unless I am very much mistaken things ain’t remotely over yet………………..