If I had persisted with a tried and very trusted technique yesterday morning, would I have ended up blanking?

Okay, so I am obviously never going to know, but because of my guiding trip over to Ireland (where I don’t fish) and then coming home to flat calm conditions, I haven’t fished in the surf for a few weeks now. When I went away to Kerry we had been catching plenty of bass in the surf by fishing in a very simple way indeed - wading out, whacking mostly metal lures out, and then winding them in. There is obviously a lot more to it with conditions and tides and so on, but what I do love about surf fishing is how the actual techniques are for the most part nice and simple……….

For sure there are a number of different lures and techniques to try, and for example I have found a personal preference for darker metal lures in the early morning half-light time especially - and so on - but find where the bass are in the surf and they have tended to be pretty fired up. When I have been in amongst a lot of fish I have of course done what I usually do and played around with a few different lures, but at the end of the day I am sure I am not remotely unique in turning up to go surf fishing and clipping something on like the (metal) Seeker or indeed this new Savage Gear Pencil 125 and blasting it out there.

And that is exactly what I did early yesterday morning when I went surf fishing for the first time in a few weeks. I clipped on a 28g Seeker in the Black Pearl colour, I waded out not very far to be honest with the serious surge that was pushing in, and I whacked it out and started a simple straight retrieve. A few weeks ago and I’d have been confident of a bass pretty quickly, but after a while of fishing like this yesterday morning I hadn’t had a sniff.

What I so like about the Seeker over a heap of other metals that I have obviously gone and bought with this surf addiction kicking in good and proper is that it’s a metal lure which gives me serious distance if needs be, but on a slowish to medium sort of straight retrieve the Seeker is actually coming right up in the water and fishing not far below the surface. This often seems to be a very good thing, only it wasn’t working for me early yesterday morning…………..

So I changed my lure and technique. Changing lures with a surge that’s constantly trying to take your feet away isn’t always the easiest, but I managed to man the hell up and clip on a 30g+ paddletail/jig head combination. It’s a prototype lure and I can’t show any photos of it or talk about it in any more detail, but I have been itching to give it a go ever since I got back from Ireland and it was waiting for me here in a little parcel of loveliness. I had inserted a nice loud rattle into the body of the lure as well.

I guess you could whack a paddletail like this out and wind it straight in, but I couldn’t really see the point of trying to fish it like I would a Seeker, so I put it out there into all that white turbulence, let it hit the bottom, and worked/hopped it back along the bottom. Third cast and bang, bass on! A few fish later and I radioed my mate Gary to ask how he was getting on and that I had started to find some fish but they seemed to want to feed tight to the bottom. I believe Gary changed over to one of those Major Craft Jipara casting jigs which of course can be worked tight to the bottom, and almost straight away he was into fish as well.

So would I have ended up blanking if I had persisted with fishing a metal lure just under the surface like I was doing through the summer and catching really well on it? I will never know of course, but a couple of times yesterday morning I did change back to a Seeker, got no hits, and then changed back to the paddletail and got nailed again. It may not be a monster, but the scrap off a very chunky 4lb+ bass in all that surf and current will live with me for a long time - damn these wonderful fish give their all in fizzed up water. Oh, and Gary did end up catching a few bass yesterday morning on the white coloured Savage Gear Seeker - go figure!

You all have a good weekend, and I sincerely hope that at 9am on Saturday morning you will either be in front of the TV for the truly immense England v New Zealand World Cup match, or else out in Japan and at the actual game. Can we really beat the All Blacks? Dare we dream of what could possibly be? Best of luck as well to any Welsh readers for your monster game on Sunday. Imagine an England v Wales World Cup Final…………

Disclosure - if you buy anything using links found in this blog post or around my website, I may make a commission. It doesn’t cost you any more to buy via these affiliate links - and please feel entirely free not to do so of course - but it will help me to continue producing content. Thank you.