If there was one part of your bass lure fishing you'd like to improve upon or learn more about, what would it be?

I need to reference this question back to a post I saw on Facebook over the weekend - it really got me thinking and I hope the lad who posted the question doesn’t mind me shamelessly acquiring it for this blog post! Thank you kind sir. There are obviously a few experts within fishing who know it all anyway and don’t feel the need to try and improve upon their current fishing skills and/or try to help other anglers out a bit, but for us mere mortals who love our fishing and are always trying to get better - what’s the one aspect of your own lure fishing for bass that you might already do but you will strive to improve your current skill levels this year, or is there a part of this kind of fishing so many of us obsess about that you want to try and learn about and perhaps that then becomes a part of your armoury?

I guess I have been lucky to have caught any number of different species of fish all around the world using a range of different techniques, but at the end of the day my day to day fishing is what I do around where I live - and this is what I am always doing my best to get better at. As much as I might love chucking the odd fly at a skinny-water bonefish when the clients are having lunch and I can quickly grab a rod and have a go for example - very badly I might add - I don’t spend time here at home trying to get better at it because I don’t go fishing for bonefish. If they were my local species and I fished for them all the time like I do for bass then things would be different, but I live here in Cornwall and for whatever reason chucking lures for bass is my thing.

I can and do look at my own fishing skills and I can see a thousand different ways of trying to get better, and from time to time I hear about anglers catching bass in certain ways and in types of locations I might not target and I think about how I might adapt and change and so on. It wasn’t that long ago when fishing with lures at night for bass wasn’t on my radar at all, but over the last few years it’s become as normal to me as twitching a soft plastic over a shallow reef early in the morning. I have a feeling that with how much fun this whole surf fishing with lures thing is, in a few years time I’ll be looking back on my fishing and it’ll have become a totally normal and regular part of my lure fishing quiver.

I could go on and on about where I think I need to improve with my own fishing, but to be honest much of this blog is really me thinking out loud and trying to become a better angler along the way anyway. I could also bang on and on about confidence and how there is no shortcut to adding new techniques and types of lure to your quivers because you simply have to catch fish to feel confident - how easy it is to dismiss something different because we aren’t getting it to work for us? - and in fact THE one thing I am absolutely determined to learn more about and improve upon is catching bass on lures at night when there is plenty of moon in the sky because currently I have little confidence in doing so.

At the moment I have close to zero confidence in catching bass on lures when there is a full moon or close to a full moon with no cloud cover, and I am utterly determined to break this cycle in 2020 and see if I can start to regularly catch bass when conditions are like this. I have caught plenty of bass on clear sky nights when there’s say no more than a half moon and you haven’t got that vibrant sort of shimmer on the water that you get around a full moon, but for any number of reasons I can’t recall catching bass on lures on a proper full moon. It’s a vicious cycle of course because I have so little confidence in catching and it therefore becomes a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy because I will try and avoid calm, full to near full moon nights because I am not confident enough. I feel very confident on dark nights on specific marks with mainly white lures especially, but via some stuff which I will be referencing most likely later in the week, if I look to improve my own fishing here then surely I need to change things up and perhaps not take the exact same approach on bright moon nights as I would when it’s nice and dark and I am buzzing with confidence?

So I reckon that’s my thing for this year. I’m going to give it a damn good go and I am going to change my general approach a bit to see if I can get full moon nights bass catching to work properly for me. I can see some changes in locations and types of locations for starters, but I can also see some changes of lure colour especially coming on, and quite possibly the actual lures as well. I will come back to all this but damn I’m excited about the bass fishing kicking off, and I guess you are too if you aren’t already catching somewhere.

And to reference Friday’s brief no blog post blog post, I put this up on Facebook on Saturday about how my youngest girl got on. If you are a parent then you will know all about what this sort of stuff means. “Apologies but it’s another of those rather proud dad moments. On the Torpoint ferry and very nearly back from Loughborough where my youngest girl was running for Cornwall in the inter counties cross country champs today. She’s gone through three different races to qualify for today and she came 26th out of 306 U13 girls from all over the country. She is so pleased, but what we as parents love the most is how both our girls work so hard at what they do, and they do their sailing and running etc with smiles on their faces and with genuine respect and consideration for their friends and competitors. Lots of driving for dad, Liverpool next weekend for the schools cross country nationals”.