It continues to fry my brain how much more water there is to check out

I like to think I know enough bass fishing marks, areas and types of ground to get me through a lot of different conditions, tides, seasons and so on, but I continue to get that sort of itchy leg syndrome because it’s never quite enough. Not that I believe the grass is always greener I might add - but it could be - rather that I live in a lovely part of the world and I can’t work out why you wouldn’t want to continue exploring and discovering as much as possible. I think back to some South African anglers I know who literally picked out an ultra-remote speck of an atoll in the middle of the Indian Ocean and then chartered a boat to take them there. A serious adventure. They had discovered some of the best saltwater fly fishing on this earth…………..

I am guessing that a lot of you here spend a fair amount of time on something like Google Earth, literally hunting for spots where you might find bass or other saltwater species we can target in our waters. But does it ever strike you that with all you might know right now, there are still a hell of a lot of places we don’t know. I could show you some of the different marks I might fish in a specific area and I bet you another angler would be saying have you fished there, or what about this bit here and so on. We might know what we know, but where’s the fun in fishing the same spots over and over again?

And yes, a lot of my thinking here is based around the increasing amount of estuary based bass fishing I find myself so absorbed by. A few years ago I would be looking for the mouths of different estuaries where I might be able to bump soft plastics along the bottom during the last few hours of an ebb tide, whereas now I am thinking about and looking for a far wider variety of bass fishing locations which could well be many miles from the mouth of the estuary. I used to have this sort of mental image of bass leaving an estuary on the ebb tide then moving back in as the flood tide got moving, but how far removed is that simple theory from the actual truth? Your head says look for a decent covering of water for the bass to move around in, when in fact the truth of the matter is often the less water the better the fishing.

Anybody else here got a bunch of spots which you physically need to go and check out? Google Earth and various online resources can get us so far, but feet on the ground and actually checking somewhere out in the real world is vital in my book. I think about one little creek I fished a bit last year and I realise that firstly I haven’t yet pushed on way up the creek to see what happens, and secondly that there is a lot of ground further up the estuary from the creek and fairly nearby that I don’t even know yet. A new year starts and with it comes the potential for so much interesting fishing……………