My brain isn’t wired this way! Fishing on my own, not catching, make one obvious change, start catching - why?

I went out yesterday morning to catch the first of the ebb tide. I wanted to get out of the rather fresh north winds so I ended up fishing an estuary spot which is a bit deeper than I would tend to fish for bass. I was on my own, there was nobody else around other than Storm my sheepdog, and it was all rather glorious save for the fact that I wasn’t exactly setting the world catch rate record alive…………

There was a tinge on the estuary water via the recent bit of rain and the biggish tide, but I happen to think that my estuary based lure fishing was negatively affected in the height of that amazing summer we had when the water everywhere was so clear you could almost count pebbles at any depth. I started off with the larger 13cm/33g Cotton Candy colour Sandeel V2 Weedless yesterday morning to deal with the depth and the current which was starting to run, and yes, it was because the Cotton Candy versions of these lures have done me so proud since I first started fishing with samples of them earlier last year. Clipping on this lure in this colour gives me a lot of confidence on the sort of mark I was fishing.

But nothing was doing when with the state of tide especially I had I kinda fancied a bass to jump on the end of my line pretty quickly and confirm to me that I hadn’t made a bum call. I am going to assume here that if you are fishing with a friend or two then you will communicate amongst yourselves if one of you is catching and the other(s) are not - if not, why not? - but you obviously can’t do this when you are fishing on your own like I was yesterday morning. I know that via my working on fishing tackle I am going to sometimes negatively affect my own fishing because I will chop and change more than I usually would to test stuff out and so on, but it’s something I can happily live with to get to do what I do. At the end of the day I am always going to be an angler though, so should I persist with my current approach or do I change a variable to see if it might make a difference?

With where I was fishing and with how the lie of the land was essentially dictating my tactics, I wasn’t going to go from bumping something along the bottom to fishing say a surface lure. Nope, in my mind the obvious change to make first was the colour of my lure which happened to be Sandeel V2 Weedless (and which might well have been something different for you). So I did just that. Nothing on my tried and very trusted cotton candy colour Sandeel V2 Weedless, so I unclipped it and clipped on the pink colour because why the hell not?

Okay, there’s a bit more to it than me blindly reaching into my lure box for a pink coloured lure. Like you I tend to carry colours of lures which I think might work in the conditions I am likely to find and/or because certain colours have previously worked for me where I have decided to go fishing, but I was carrying a bright pink version of the Sandeel V2 Weedless yesterday morning mainly because of what I have seen other anglers doing with it recently. I can’t exactly try to pretend that I was trying to imitate some kind of local baitfish with a pink coloured soft plastic, but for some reason I will never know, pink lures seem to work well sometimes. So out it went into the current.

And wouldn’t you bloody know it I went and hooked up. My first cast after a lure colour change goes and produces a bass, and then another bass on the next cast. So I did what I will often do and I chopped and changed a bit to see if I could get a better understanding if it really was the different colour of the same lure which was making all the difference. But after a bunch of bass on the pink lure and no bass on anything else at the end of the session, my brain is officially fried because I naturally look for logic whilst also embracing that it can never fully be this way with fishing. Because I was on my own I also have to accept that there may well have been other variables involved - were the bass I caught by pure chance happening to move through only when I had the pink lure on for example? - but I also wonder if it is often the simplest thing which can make the difference. I changed lure colour and caught fish. I won’t put a blog post up on Monday because it doesn’t feel right to do so, but you all have a good weekend and I will see you again most likely next Wednesday. Pink on the brain. Brain is fried. Help!

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