It’s scary how quickly a good fishing session can go wrong

How often does almost every single influencing factor we can think of align pretty much perfectly for a fishing spot you have in mind? I’m talking the size of the tide, the times of the tide, the wind direction, the wind strength, the time of first light, the light levels, the water clarity, the sea state, the direction of the waves and even virtually no weed to mask your hooks. What had I stepped in to get this lucky? We got all that on Monday morning and it was all I could do to not run down some rather slippery grass slopes and rocks to get at the fishing. Everything looked so good it was one of those times when I told myself that if at least one of us didn’t catch I was going to heave all my gear in the tide after the session and take up pole dancing. Wearing an all-in-one lycra bodysuit of course…………

Anyway, so my fishing gear breathed a sigh of relief on about the tenth cast when I hooked a bass on the ever-deadly surface lure for decent headwinds and increasingly bouncy seas - yep, you know what it is, the Patchinko. I was fishing with my mate Mark and another thoroughly nice lad who we shall call Dutch for the sake of this blog post (best film ever made? If you know, you know). There is a lot of room where we were fishing and when the bass are around they often seem to move around the mark and you need to try and keep on top of them, so I called Dutch over to where I was standing and in no time at all he was hooked up as well. To be honest that was me made up there and then. A lad comes fishing with you on “your” stretch of coastline that I would call my backyard and he catches a bass pretty quickly. Yep, it makes me very happy to see this, and it obviously helps that Dutch is a really nice bloke as well.

This photo is NOT from the Monday session that I am talking about in this blog post, but you get the point

It was pretty evident that there were a fair few bass around, so for me and what I do in fishing it was time to play around with different stuff. For sure I caught a few fish on the Patchinko because it’s almost my “control” lure for the conditions we found yesterday morning. I could clip on a sample lure I had with me, see that with one of them for example it wasn’t coping properly with the lively seas - to be fair it wasn’t meant for conditions like these - then take it off, clip the Patchinko back on, and bang, fish on. One of the samples did work straight away in one particular configuration so I could bank that knowledge away and keep doing my thing. At one point the fishing went quiet but we soon found the fish again in a big back eddy that had formed. They were now hanging around off the edge of a bit of reef and I turned to the lemon back 12.5cm/28g Savage Minnow because I could almost hold it in the backwash and the bass were jumping on it. This was about as much fun as fishing gets to me, but please forgive the lack of any photos of the session because it had been pissing it down literally since I had put the rods on the Vac-Rac on my Epic Berlingo a few hours before.

And then the session very suddenly went very wrong literally in an instant. From good to bad in the blink of an eye. Just like that we went from having a blast together to very suddenly being faced with a potentially serious situation, and yet again it has banged home just how quickly things can go wrong when you spend time around bouncy sea conditions like so many of us do so much of the time…………

Mark was fishing on the east side of the rocks and Dutch had moved a bit to the west. I went back to my bag to grab my flask of coffee which I hadn’t been able to sample yet because the fishing had been a bit hectic. I opened up my waterproof rucksack, got my awesome little, can’t function without it, Lifeventure thermal mug out, and by pure chance my natural way to turn back around with the jagged nature of the rocks and mug in hand was towards where Dutch was standing rather than where Mark was. Literally as my eyes fell upon Dutch he was very suddenly and without any warning taken clean off his feet by a wave and dumped down like a sack of spuds into a gully that was just to the left of where he was standing. I was the only one of the three of us wearing a lifejacket - Mark and Dutch are grownups and it’s up to them what they choose to do - and what gets to me the most about what happened was what if that wave had dumped Dutch down as hard as that AND then dragged him out to sea? If that had happened I think we’d be talking about something I sincerely hope I never have to see with my fishing.

So Dutch was put down hard, and I mean properly hard. When you’re hit like that with no warning you have no time to brace yourself or try and turn away. Dutch was dumped down in that gully, the wave receded, I shouted to Mark to get the hell over here, and I raced down to Dutch. First thing I did was to get my body in front of his head which was pointing down the gully and towards the sea, in case another wave came in so I could be a barrier to stop him getting sucked out. Dutch was conscious and we managed to get him talking, but he couldn’t move and to me he looked to be in a real state of shock. Mark and I stayed very close to Dutch and kept talking to him until he was just about able to start moving and we could help him up and at least a bit further away from the sea which had luckily not sent any other particularly big waves our way.

So what do we do now? It’s not a majorly tricky spot to get down to or out of, but when you’ve got a lad who is barely able to move and is obviously in a lot of pain, how the hell does he get back up the cliffs, across the grassy slopes, and back to our cars? I started talking about calling the coastguard and asking for help and/or advice, but Mark and Dutch quite rightly said to give it a bit more time and see whether Dutch could get enough movement back to slowly and gingerly walk out of there. I then suggested I walk back to the cars where I know I can get a mobile signal if needed, and I could keep in touch with Mark via the 2-way radios I always carry and give to the lads I am fishing with. These radios are more for putting good bass in rock pools if it’s possible, and then calling me in to take some photos if we are spread out where we are fishing, or of course to call the other lad or lads in if one particular spot is throwing up the fish. On Monday my 2-way radios came in really handy for keeping in touch with Mark when I got to where I could get a mobile signal to call for help if Dutch simply could not walk out of there, but in due course Dutch began to walk out very slowly and gingerly with Mark keeping very close to him. I went back down to walk up with them both.

I have subsequently heard that Dutch has got some badly bruised ribs and is feeling rather sore, but I am pretty sure he would agree with Mark and I that he got away relatively lightly with a situation that could have been far worse on a different day. Dutch knows the sea and his fishing but pretty early on as we started to help him up and out of the gully after he had been knocked clean off his feet he said that he had moved a bit closer to the increasingly bouncy sea just a few moments before the wave hit him - and that a part of him had said to himself not to get any closer but the other part thought why not because it looked safe. It wasn't a lifejacket situation as I said earlier but of course it could have been, and what it does prove to me above all else is that if you do this kind of thing - lure fishing for bass - we are spending a lot of our time at sea level or very close to the sea or obviously sometimes actually in it when we are wading. Stuff can go wrong in an instant, and especially when you’re fishing the kind of conditions we were on Monday morning. There can be no moral of the story because something like this could and quite possibly has happened to any of us here, but on the flipside I would urge you to exercise caution and listen to any voices in your head which might be urging you to at least hang back and watch the conditions for a while. And please, before you go buying that next new rod or reel or selection of shiny lures, why not buy yourself an auto-inflate lifejacket because why on earth not wear one when fishing like this? Hopefully you wear one and never end up needing what it can do for you, but it’s money well worth spending regardless - have a look at a review of the Crewsaver Crewfit 165N Sport lifejacket here, and the Spinlock Deckvest Lite lifejacket here. Please note that there have never been and never will be any affiliate links on my website or blog for any kind of fishing safety gear.

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