If there is one thing that this strange year has rammed home to me on the fishing side of things, it’s how diverse and interesting estuary fishing can be

I don’t know where we are going to be this time next year. As I am writing this blog post the ugly US presidential election is coming to a close and here in the UK we are about to go into some kind of lockdown again tomorrow. I believe we will be able to carry on fishing but obviously with some restrictions on where, how we get there, and with whom, so whatever we can or cannot do, please stay safe and well and we have to believe that we will get through this and eventually get back to what we viewed as normal at the start of the year which feels like a few lifetimes ago now. I wonder if in a few years time I look back on my fishing and also see 2020 as the year when I finally started to better understand more of my local estuary fishing, and the multitude of bass related options these quieter waterways can offer us.

Now don’t get me wrong, I love a bouncy open coast bass fishing session as much as the next fishing nut, and those calm, clear nights when you get that glorious jolt as a bass hits your lure in the inky blackness is an amazing thrill. Estuary fishing for bass is not a new thing to me, indeed the lad who so kindly helped me get into this fishing addiction over in south east Ireland had me bass fishing a most magical estuary almost from day one. I can’t pretend that when I put down the bait gear and tried fishing lures in that estuary that I had much of a clue what to do (and perhaps I still do not!), but the point is that a lot of us here associate bass fishing with estuaries and creeks and river mouths and so on. I get that there can sometimes be a lot of smaller school bass in the estuaries, as indeed there can be on the open coast, but with how many big bass are caught from estuary systems on lures and bait, I personally feel that not fishing them when there are so many different waterways around so much of the UK and indeed Ireland would be a bit daft. Hell, if bass fishing revolved around the one method or the one type of location I’d have lost interest in this kind of fishing a long time ago. It’s the variety of locations and conditions and methods that continue to obsess me about these fine fish we call bass.

There will be a number of you kindly reading todays’ blog post who have a far better grasp of fishing estuaries for bass than me, but if I think about my current level of knowledge of locations/marks and how I have been approaching them, then it continues to amaze me just how versatile our lure fishing needs to be to deal with all these things. From blasting something like the Patchinko or even this new and almost ridiculous how far it casts 30g Samson Bomb surface lure out to reach a nice bit of current to deftly twitching a soft plastic along the calm edges of a load of bladderwrack, from bumping paddletails and other such lures along the bottom almost Chezch-nymph style to blasting out a Seeker and fishing it with an aggressive spin-stop retrieve - with everything in between and then surely a bunch more ways which I haven’t even thought of yet. How about what is arguably the purest form of fishing there is - sight fishing? How about scaling things right down to target big, spooky bass like fly anglers might offer up tiny flies on very light leaders to some of those monster wild brown trout in somewhere like New Zealand? I am obviously a huge fan of these new Gravity Stick soft plastics that I have worked on in conjunction with Savage Gear, but even so I am realistic enough to accept that there have to be times when estuary based bass might not want to hit a lure of this size.

And how I “see” the ground in estuaries is changing for sure. My knowledge levels may be less than a lot of you here, and over the years a lot of my estuary bass fishing has been based around current on the ebb tide. I am not about to stop looking for and fishing areas of current mind you, rather that I am finding myself looking for a wider variety of estuary terrains these days. I went for a couple of good dog walks last weekend for example when the weather was truly horrible. I have walked around that area a thousand times, but over the weekend I went looking with different eyes, and I saw a lot more. For sure there’s a lot of lovely current on the ebb tide especially, but now I found myself looking at all that bladderwrack which I hadn’t really taken that much notice of before, and I was imagining one of the GS Pulsetail lures “pulsing” around and through all that cover where predators can ambush prey. A few years ago I’d have looked at this spot and thought about when the current looked the best to fish for bass, but now I am looking at it in a bunch of different ways. This really excites me, indeed it’s this visualisation and thinking about fishing stuff that continues to fire my imagination and also helps to inspire my thinking for this Savage Gear related bass lure fishing work that I am so involved with now. You all please stay safe, and I wish you the best of luck trying to understand all the different rules and regulations for tomorrow’s lockdown!

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