I turn 50 tomorrow, not quite sure how that happened, I’ve had my birthday present already - a February 2023 bass!

I think back to when I was 18 because I can still vividly remember being absolutely convinced that I knew it all. Then when I got to 21 I realised that at 18 I knew bugger all. When I turned 21 my mum was 41 and my dad was 43, and I thought they were pretty old. But tomorrow I turn 50 myself, and I am sure my two girls (16 and 18) in turn think that their dad is pretty old. I know they worry about my lack of maturity and that dad really should be getting to grips with various issues which I pretend to struggle with more than I actually do - what, parents winding their teenage kids up? Never! - but getting older or indeed old has never bothered me. It’s what happens. Tomorrow is my 50th birthday and I am very lucky to have such a fantastic family. I couldn’t ask for anymore. The only thing missing is that I’d have loved to be able to call my dad up as his fifty year old son because I know it would have made him laugh.

On Friday afternoon I got an early birthday present in the shape of a February bass on a lure in the UK! Add it to the two bass I caught in February 2022 and we’re talking about a Henry grand total of three February bass on lures. Hell, I might be an expert at it now! Got any questions about how to plan a February lure fishing for bass attack? I might be your man. Need any help with deciding where to fish and when? Get in touch. Three mighty February captures from a number of years of trying and I reckon I’ve got it sussed……………

Or perhaps not. I am choosing to give all credit to my Friday bass to my mate Mark. At 5.30am on Friday morning I got a message from Mark to say that he’d come up with a cunning plan for the high water that afternoon and into early evening. I had a quick look at the tides, winds and swell forecasts and then messaged back to say yes indeed, ‘twas a rather cunning plan. I hadn’t planned to go fishing but it worked out perfectly as my lot were off to the theatre and I was going to be home alone for the evening anyway. So I grabbed Mark at the arranged time and off we went.

This is not from Friday, but it’s me fishing the same reef a few weeks ago

As you know I always carry radios and give them to whoever I am fishing with. We split up to fish different sections of a fairly big and very shallow reef system, and I do remember saying to Mark how cunning his plan really was now that I got to see the sea conditions. Really rather nice, and whilst it’s always easy to say how good you felt about the session with the benefit of hindsight, plus I know it’s February and all that, both us felt really quite confident with how the sea and water clarity was looking. Mark went west and I went east. And within no time at all I got a bang.

And a really sharp “bang” at that. I had been thinking about how Mark had caught some early (or late?) bass last year on that rather clever MegaBass Dark Sleeper soft plastic, and as much as I obviously obsess about “my” SG Gravity Stick soft plastics for shallow ground especially, one lure I never used to fish enough was the smaller Fiiish Black Minnow 90. I know so many bass anglers who swore by the thing - and most likely still do - and via my work with Savage Gear we have got our J-hook Savage Minnow and Savage Minnow Weedless (a lure which I said from day one was directly inspired by the very clever Black Minnow system of head and hook and paddletail body all fitting together). What a lot of anglers don’t realise is how much time and effort we put into the jig head design on these Savage Minnow lures, indeed I reckon Mads still has a few nightmares about me pushing and pushing until we arrived at the one jig head design with which I could effectively swim or bump and swim/bump and sink and draw etc. - without needing to change the type of jig head. All credit to Mads here. I questioned and asked and pushed, and he created. He is a wizard.

The little Savage Minnow Weedless 10cm/16g in the khaki colour, this is what got me my Feb 2023 bass

Anyway, because I don’t own any MegaBass Dark Sleepers but I wanted to fish the shallow reef more like that than simply swimming weedless soft plastics like the Gravity Sticks or Slender Scoop Shads, I chose to really concentrate on the little 10cm/16g Savage Minnow Weedless. I am not saying this does exactly the same thing as the Dark Sleeper because it doesn’t (and wasn’t designed to either), but I do know that I have a number of options with something like the Savage Minnow Weedless over seriously rough ground. Especially the smaller size.

So pretty quickly after starting fishing I got a definite and rather sharp bang on the lure, but the fish didn’t connect. My heart obviously started pumping that bit more than it already was with the rather lovely sea conditions, and I radioed Mark to let him know there was at least a sign of a bass. On my next cast I got another bang, only this time the fish was on and my heart rate went through the roof - but it wasn’t a bass. Nope, it was a bloody wrasse which I quickly returned! I know that if I was fishing that type of ground in say the Isles of Scilly that February can be an incredible time of year for catching wrasse on soft plastics, but the south coast of Cornwall and in such shallow water? At least I had caught a fish so I radioed Mark again to say wrasse landed and that surely if there was a wrasse on the reef there could also be a bass or two?

Please excuse the photo - low light, iPhone, not a great combination. But it’s a February bass!

I moved to another section of the reef to target a little bit of rip current I could see forming, and by doing nothing more than whacking the little Savage Minnow Weedless in with my rod tip and at a speed where I could sometimes feel it just clipping the bottom so I knew it was staying down a bit, well I couldn’t have missed the next hit if I had tried to. Bang and on, one of those hits you love to get, and especially on a Friday evening in early February. My single bass might have nudged 2lbs at best, but size simply doesn’t matter when it comes to early birthday presents. Give me some decent conditions and I will keep trying for a bass or two this month, but March still remains as the single month in which I have never had a lure-caught bass. I thought I could be in with a shout last year but the conditions were awful. I am going to keep trying because why the hell not? Tomorrow I will hit the ripe old age of 50 without having really grown up at all, and why the hell not to that as well? The long hair is back, I’m a bit wider but wiser, I am more obsessed with fishing than I ever was, and dad, I never did grow out of that horrible music!

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