Mild winter, stunning spring, masses of bait around now, is everything late or is it actually normal, what the hell do we really know anyway?

If you are out bass fishing at the moment and/or you keep an ear to the ground and so on, I am guessing you are aware that there’s a hell of a lot of bait inshore which has turned up recently. I also wonder whether you are having what I’d refer to down here as a late “getting going” to the bass fishing, as in we were straight on bass once lockdown was lessened and we could get out there again, but then things got really tough. It only seems to be recently that the inshore waters have come alive again with what I think are small whitebait and then mackerel feeding on them, and then if you are in the right place at the right time, bass in there feeding as well.

So yet again I come back to us anglers as human beings who like to think that we have a certain understanding of the natural world and her rhythms, but in truth what do we really know when things don’t happen quite as we expect them to? We get that very mild winter albeit we essentially lost November and December for shore based lure fishing down here because of the storms and rain and so on, and then we get what was truly the most incredible three months or so of spring weather that I can ever remember in nearly thirty years of living in the south west - and my head said wow, surely all that warmth is going to be the recipe for an amazing early season of bass fishing and we’re going to fill our boots……………

Which certainly wasn’t the case! I am not about to shy away from all that I have been blogging about recently with the scary netting related issues here in Cornwall especially, but on the other hand I refuse to believe that all the bass in Cornwall have been taken out of the sea - yet I might add. Damn right there are issues which simply have to be addressed and corners fought for (rewatching The Wire which is The Greatest TV Series Ever Made, end of, hence the corners reference), but yet again I can’t help but come back to how much we as human beings are surely guessing at so much of what goes on in the natural world when things don’t happen as you might expect.

Where were the bass when they weren’t around here? We have had some much better fishing recently and I am also seeing and hearing of far more reports of some good bass fishing all over the place, and a lot of anglers are talking about how much bait there suddenly is out there. So for those lean periods we have been having around here when around the same time last year we were doing just fine - where have the bass been? On the one hand I really want to know it all because it would surely mean I could catch more fish, but on the other hand I can’t help but feel a certain kind of satisfaction that with all mankind’s knowledge and thirst for discovery, we seem to be nowhere close to knowing all there is to know about nature and the natural world. We can make mobile phones that are meant to be more powerful than the computers which sent men to the moon all those years ago now, and we can make fishing tackle that can tackle almost anything that swims - but when those fish that we target for whatever reason don’t do more of what we expect them to do, how often we are left clutching at straws for the real reasons?