Is losing three bass on the same lure bad luck or fishing like a tit?

It’s a technique I probably don’t use enough, but in the right places it can be frigging deadly - and with a big thanks as ever here to a very good bass angler from Portugal who opened my eyes up to deliberately fishing the Fiiish Black Minnow or equivalent paddletail rigged weedless along the (rocky) bottom over shallow to shallowish reefs. A few lads I know and fish with from to time have run with this technique and are bloody good at it, and every time I fish like this I can’t help but think about how it’s such an efficient and effective way to cover a lot of rough ground on the hunt for fish………..

Anyway, we managed to find some okay water down here on the south coast on Saturday morning, and pretty quickly Mark was into a bass doing exactly as I alluded to above, and then soon after he released the fish he walked back to his waterproof rucksack for some reason. I then got one hell of a bang on my 12g/120mm Black Minnow and struck into a bass that I knew straight away was a decent fish with how it momentarily stayed right there until I could really bend hard into it and get it moving. My heart starts racing and I know I’m grinning like a bit of an eejut in the gloom of an early winter morning.

Let’s say about five+ seconds into this tussle and all of a sudden there’s a Black Minnow whistling past my nose to land on the rocks about fifteen yards behind me. I like to pull the living daylights out of my fish because I can’t see the point in not doing so, not with the kind of gear we use and how much I trust it, so when a hook very suddenly comes out of a fish’s mouth the odd lure flying past the nose thing does happen with me from time to time! Mark didn’t see any of this unfolding but I told him that I’d just dropped a decent bass, and as gutted as I was, hooks obviously do come out from time to time. For me these hooks are always barbless, and I don’t know if you do or do not crush barbs, but it matters not - when did every single hooked fish stay hooked up?

A short while later I hooked and landed a smallish bass that felt smalliish the moment I bent into it, and as pleased as I was to catch something it did highlight how much more solid that first fish felt. I love working reefs like this and I should be doing it more often really - the hits tend to be electric and I am always surprised at just how little gear I actually end up losing when fishing a jig head rigged paddletail (with the hook point buried away) in and over such rough ground. The trick for me seems to be to keep the lure moving and keep your rod tip up to be able to react to every bump of the lure along the bottom or from a fish.

Now the fishing wasn’t exactly epic but at least we had found some bass with all the weather we’ve been getting down here and the resulting filthy water killing so many of the places we like to target at this time of year. We fished on and began to follow the reef out a bit as the tide ebbed, and a while later I hooked another smallish bass that hit the surface pretty quickly and then bloody came off. I’m fishing the exact same Black Minnow as earlier and I trust the design of these lures implicitly, but two fish coming off and the one landed? I am not about to start blaming the lure at all, but further down the tide and a third bass was momentarily on but then came off and I have to ask the obvious question of myself - is it a simple case of me fishing like a tit on Saturday morning?

We have to take the odd dropped fish and any angler who says they never had a lure come out of a fish occasionally is talking out of their backside - but three bass dropped and one landed, on the same lure and with me doing nothing differently? Yep, you’ve guessed it, it’s been wrecking my head! That first bass was a good fish but not a monster, but damn I’d have love to have seen it to stop my brain whirring quite so much. I have looked closely at the weedless hook on this particular 120mm Black Minnow and it’s the same as any others I have here. I will never actually know why the hook pulled on those three fish but stuck in the one I landed. I can speculate until the cows come home, and as much as I want to blame the fish or the lure or the ways the stars were aligned over the weekend, it could well have been a very simple case of angler error - or as I said earlier, what is technically known as fishing like a tit…………..

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