I spent most of yesterday giving myself a damned good thrashing for being such an idiot

Now if a good friend of mine hadn’t caught a bunch of bass yesterday I would not be writing this blog post, but he did, and he caught them from a spot which I have been telling myself to get back to because we tried it out for the first time last year and caught bass in exactly the sort of conditions that were forecast. I had been keeping a close eye on the wind directions for much of last week, and from a few days out I had been planning to fish this exact spot yesterday morning…………….

Where I should have been yesterday if I hadn’t gone with the easier option

But when crunch time came on deciding on where to go fishing I didn’t back my call and I ended up playing it safe by fishing somewhere closer to home and which I know far better but it turned out to be unfishable and I should have bloody well known it as well. I am so glad my mate caught fish because firstly it follows on from what we started to find out around this time last year about this particular location, and secondly it bangs home to me just how stupid I was by not backing a gut feeling and instead taking the easier option of fishing somewhere I know far better. My local webcam looked amazing but damn those crappy cameras can fool you sometimes, the water was also full of weed, and if I had actually fished from one particular rock without first waiting and watching the rather large waves rolling in I reckon I’d have been washed in. It was that hairy out there and I am so angry at myself for being so stupid.

Fishing to me is so much about trying new places and methods and all that good stuff, but from time to time I wonder if it kinda creeps up on you that it’s a little bit easier to fish where you know instead of working on furthering your knowledge and skills by trying something different. I know my local coastline has been a bit quiet recently, but in my defense I was really interested to know if a change from NW to SW winds was going to make the difference I hoped it would around here. It might well have done, but going on the conditions I found yesterday morning plus the fact that another mate was out somewhere else and not only blanked but also rather wisely chose to get off the rocks with the building swell, well let’s put all that together and you will now understand why I spent the rest of Sunday doing a Basil Fawlty on myself.

We all make good and bad calls on where to go fishing, but when you have done the maths as such and come up with a location but at the last minute you change your mind and then your mate catches a bunch of fish from there because he wisely didn’t change his mind and stuck to what was a pretty logical plan? Any of us here can blank at the best of times, but my blank yesterday morning was my fault and I have made a promise to myself that no more complacency is going to be allowed to creep into my fishing. Anybody fancy borrowing a well used branch?