More January bass and a very early contender for my fishing photograph of the year
Okay, so one bass was landed and it wasn’t by me, but it was a January bass from the open coast landed by Dave, and I dropped a fish which was briefly on but then came off. That weather which ripped through on Sunday felt worse than the forecast, so I knew my local coastline would be in pieces for a while. As much as I tend to dislike NW winds, what came through on Monday gave me a bit of hope that a small corner might just be okay for a session yesterday morning…………..
And for all the information you can find out before you go fishing, at the end of the day it’s the middle of a UK winter and you never really know what you are going to find until you are physically (and not virtually) out there with your own eyes on it. I was hopeful that we’d find it fishable, and of course Storm was up for a walk and didn’t give a toss whether it could be choked with weed or other such stuff. Beggars can’t be too picky in the middle of a run of weather like this, and if you don’t go you’ll never know. I also don’t know this location that well so each time I fish it I am committing more understanding about the place to my memory bank.
Go to the bottom of the blog post to see the photo which I think is an early contender for my photo of the year
I have tended to approach the fishing here by clipping on lures like the (paddletail on a jig head) Savage Gear Sandeel V2 and Weedless. By changing weights and sizes I get various options to fish almost the entire water column and then work the lure along the bottom in the backwash as well. My mate Andy has done well on that amazing MegaBass Zonk 120 hard lure because he can so easily hold it almost in place as the waves do their thing, then Dave had his first ever January bass yesterday morning on that stunning looking EvoBass Sabre paddletail rigged on a weedless Decoy jig head I believe. It wasn’t a big fish, but it was a bass which was caught when I literally could not think of a single other location I know of which might have been fishable.
Dave put me onto some interesting looking BKK jig heads the other day, and I really like how they work with various soft plastics I tend to use. I particularly like how they sit with the 13cm Slender Scoop Shad, and as I was working the combination along the bottom yesterday morning I got that familiar tap, tap, bang. I lifted into the bass, the rod tip went over and bounced, then the sodding fish came off. I believe that BKK products will be more readily available in the UK in the near future so I will hopefully be able to buy a few more sizes of these jig heads.
Not the most epic of sessions I grant you, but we found bass in January and I still haven’t seen another angler where we were fishing. When that sun finally crept over some cliff tops and began to illuminate where we were fishing - in between some hefty showers I might add - I pulled away from the fishing and went off to find an interesting camera angle on Dave. Fishing to me is an emotional pastime, and I will always try my best to make what we love to do look as dramatic and exciting as possible. Often the location and/or light or conditions don’t lend themselves to a “wow” photo, but yesterday was one of those rare times when the photography gods have obviously had a word with the fishing gods and decided to donate an opportunity to somebody like me.
Really proud of this one!
The skill I guess is recognising when a number of factors suddenly come together and then knowing how to frame the scene and technically shoot it. Put ten photographers where I was standing yesterday morning and I am sure we’d have all shot it in a different way, but I specialise in photographing fishing and I can’t help but look for the sort of hectic stuff you can see going on in this photograph. For the technically minded I shot this on a Sony A7RV camera body with the Sony 70-200 f2.8 lens at 79mm. The exposure was 1/1000th of a second at f4, ISO 125, and I was on the 10 frames per second motordrive to make the most of those waves rolling in and hopefully nail the precise sort of moment you can see here. When I processed the RAW file in Lightroom, I didn’t open up the shadows at all because I want to retain the darkness of the cliffs behind to help highlight the crashing white water. By pure chance Dave was standing in the right sort of spot and he carried on with his retrieve as the wave did its best to knock him off his feet!
Might I have actually landed a bass yesterday morning if I hadn’t stopped fishing a few times yesterday to get my camera gear out? I will never know, but what I do know is that I will never see the exact combination of location, light, sea state, tide and angler quite like that again. If I hadn’t bothered to pull away from the fishing and shoot a photograph like this when I can see what’s going on I would never forgive myself. This blog is basically me offloading the contents of my head, and that you kind readers is how the fishing and photography part of my brain works……………..
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