I need to let my lures spend more time washing around close in (and the light went absolutely loopy!)

I like to think that I am a half-decent angler who really enjoys communicating about fishing and trying his best via photography and writing to make this fine pastime/sport look and sound as appealing as possible. Take those extras away though and at heart I remain an obsessed angler who loves the whole learning and adapting side to fishing. I also hope that I can recognise when I could be doing specific fishing things a bit better…………..

A session last week was a classic example of this. I would imagine that with the current weather patterns a lot of you are struggling with water clarity and weed. I know that we are around here, but my mate Mark came up with what turned out to be a rather clever plan to try and find some decent water for lure fishing. I must admit that I had my doubts about what we might find, but if there is one thing I enjoy doing in fishing it’s trying different locations. You never know what will happen or whether you might stumble across something rather interesting for the future.

So we left the brown, raging mess of our local coastline behind, and after a bit of a drive we found what can only be described as some stunning conditions. All credit to Mark and certainly not to slightly doubting Henry! We had no idea whether we were fishing at a decent state of tide for this place, but we picked the first of the ebb because a number of bass marks that Mark and I fish together seem to switch on as that tide turns after high water - and within about ten minutes of starting fishing I had a hard, sharp bang on my 15cm Slender Scoop Shad. It didn’t result in a hookup but on the other hand I couldn’t see how it could have been anything other than a bass. I radioed Mark to let him know.

There was a problem though - I could also see a potentially unique photographic opportunity that looked like it might develop. I have been obsessed with fishing photography for long enough now to recognise potential, so I radioed Mark to ask if he would mind me wandering over, handing him a new lure rod I am playing with - the Major Craft Crosride 5G 9'4'' 15-40g (absolutely effortless, review to come) - and if he would be okay with standing on a specific set of rocks for a few minutes because I had a strong feeling that a lot of factors were about to come together to enable me to shoot the photos you can see here today. I won’t bore you with how many things need to happen to be able to shoot these types of photos - if it’s going to happen it can only happen on a very specific type of location - but it’s very rare, and with the setting sun it wasn’t going to happen for very long.

Now it so happened that this particular set of rocks where Mark so kindly did fish from for a short while was also putting him right in amongst the lovely bouncy conditions and lots of swirling back-eddies and turbulence. The sort of water that he is so good at covering and which I know that when I am not taking photos I need to cover more deliberately with my own lures instead of giving it a bit of a go and then telling myself that perhaps the bass are actually further out so I too often ignore what are often the best bits really close in. Like many of you I am sure, I have caught plenty of bass very close in, but I also know that I am often too quickly inclined to briefly cover it and then whack my lures right out there instead of letting my lures wash around for far longer in the kind of tumbling white water really close in that you can see in these photos.

And literally every single thing did indeed come together to allow me to shoot these photos, including Mark being so damn kind to stand where I asked him to for a brief while. Most of the time I just shoot what I can when I can of people fishing, but very occasionally I can see something extra special developing and I am lucky to often fish with some lads who will very kindly help me out. What is really extra special though is when one of the lads then goes and hooks a fish right when I am hoping so much that they might, and Mark did just that…………….

Because he’s very good at fishing those close in areas of interest very accurately and deliberately. You know how much I love “my” Gravity Stick soft plastics and all that they can do for me on the bass fishing front, but for various lure design reasons which I am learning more and more about, the SG Slender Scoop Shad paddletails in the 13cm and 15cm sizes really, really suit literally washing around, “holding”, and swimming in a load of turbulence. I have tried various different ways of rigging these Slender Scoop Shads, and for the bulk of my bass fishing with them I have settled on either the 6/0 3g belly-weight weedless hooks we did for the original Gravity Sticks, or if I need more weight for the conditions, the 5/0 or 6/0 7g Berkley Fusion belly-weight hooks for the 13cm Slender Scoop Shad, and the 7/0 11g version for the 15cm Slender Scoop Shad. And yes, I will chop and change the hooks and their corresponding belly-weights to better suit the amount of grip I am after with the conditions (giving up on pre-rigging a load of soft plastics has made chopping and changing so much easier). Anyway, that session feels like a lifetime ago now with the frigging weather currently doing its November thing!

15cm Slender Scoop Shad on the 7/0 11g Berkley hook

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