After the session that was Monday’s blog post, I headed out to a rock mark on my own that afternoon. I seriously liked the rather bouncy conditions - auto-inflate lifejacket very much on - and I wanted to see if there was any sign of bass in a particular area now that we had all that life back to the sea. I found the mark fishable but I was going to have to be very careful and not get remotely close to the sea with how much it was surging, indeed the sheer volume of water moving around meant that I couldn’t safely fish some bits of the water I wanted to. There’s plenty of ground out there though…………

So I did what I presume that most of us do when we turn up at a location we have fished and caught from before in similar conditions - I started off with certain lures/colours/techniques which have worked for me there before, and fished them hard. A while later though and with a bit of current starting to run I was distinctly fishless, so I had a bit of a think. On went the IMA Hound 125F Glide in that stunning mackerel colour that for some reason seems to often sniff a bass out when other stuff hasn’t worked, and wouldn’t you bloody know it I went and hooked and landed a bass on my first cast with it. I quickly got the fish in, unhooked it, and put the mackerel Hound Glide out there again - bang, fish on, which when I was bringing it over some rocks became fish off.

But that lure and/or lure colour change saved my session, or at least that’s the way my (human) brain computes what happened. The problem with fishing on your own is that you can only ever go on what happens to you. There is no other point of reference when say your mate is catching and you’re not and they might be using a different lure or colour or technique to you. I will never know why those two bass suddenly saw fit to hit my mackerel coloured Hound Glide when I had been fishing with previously successful lures or colours or techniques, but I only had one mackerel colour lure in my box and it worked immediately. As per this recent blog post here though, were there in fact plenty of bass around but for whatever reason they weren’t hitting my lures until I changed over to something which triggered their instinct to eat it?

I then went out in the surf again early on Monday morning on my own, and because it was very much a half-light situation I started with the Black Pearl colour 35g Surf Seeker on my go-to surf lure rod, the roughly £150 Savage Gear SGS5 9’6’’ 12-46g with this almost ridiculously smooth Penn Authority 3500 spinning reel (which to be fair should feel as good as this with how much I believe it’s going to cost, but bloody hell it’s a stunning bit of kit so far. You know how much I love the Penn Slammers which let’s be honest, are more than enough spinning reel for our bass fishing, but wow this Authority is next level). If there were bass around I’d have expected a hit pretty quickly with the state of tide etc., so after a short while without any interest I changed over to the White Pearl colour 35g Surf Seeker and on about my second cast with it I went and hooked what felt like a nice bass. The bloody thing came off which bass can be prone to do in the surf, but once again was that hookup because I changed the colour of the Surf Seeker or was it simply that I managed to get (whatever colour) Seeker in front of a hungry bass exactly then?

I did then hook and land a couple of small bass on that White Pearl colour Surf Seeker, but then things went quiet for a while so I moved along the beach to some more good looking water - but nothing happened. I then thought why not when Andy on Sunday morning did so well on the Black Pearl colour Surf Seeker in light conditions I’d tend to fish with the White Pearl colour (because it has worked so well for me before) - so I changed over to that Black Pearl colour Surf Seeker and yep, bang, bass on straight away when I had been fishing the same bit of water with the White Pearl colour but hadn’t caught.

Yep, I accept completely that with just the one angler fishing there could well have been any number of different factors involved in why I did and did not catch at certain points during those two sessions. With trying to outwit nature and catch creatures which I have to believe do things based purely on instinct - and not rational thought - could it often be something as simple as changing the colour of your lure which triggers that eating instinct? I would respectfully suggest that we will never fully get to grips with the whole lure colour thing, but bloody hell it can make it difficult choosing what lures in what colours to take out fishing when you are naturally inclined to take what has worked well previously!

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