New fishing video - playing with a new GoPro, went and hooked a nice bass!

I referenced this particular bass on this blog post here from the other day, about when we went out fishing early on New Year’s Eve. I had just bought a new GoPro and I wanted to see what it was like in a real fishing situation with trying to film myself, so as Mark and I moved around a section of reef that morning I eventually gave in and thought why not give it a go. All I intended to do was get the new GoPro Hero 9 onto a tripod to see how it looked as I moved around and did some fishing. I was fishing properly as such, but I also wanted to see how certain video modes worked and also get a bit of footage to use for learning some more about the editing process. My youngest brother is a BAFTA award winning editor, but let me assure you that I am very much not! Nope, I might have presented a bunch of very small scale TV programmes many years ago now, but I was the person doing the presenting. I became more and more interested in how the shows were actually put together, but at the end of the day I needed to try and catch some fish in front of the camera……….

So the other morning I eventually got to a bit of reef that with the light I thought could look good on film. I got the GoPro out, put it on a little tripod, framed up, and hit the record button. Mark was fishing a few hundred yards away and we keep in contact via walkie talkies, but at least he couldn’t see me arsing around with a bit of filming myself antics! I walked into what I hoped was the frame and then started to fish a few bits of the reef and then when I got home I could check if I had wandered out of the frame or if I had pressed the wrong button and so on. More often than not these days I will turn to a Gravity Stick Pulsetail soft plastic rigged on one of our 6/0 weedless hooks, and because the conditions were lovely but not exactly very bouncy on the morning of New Year’s Eve I used one of the regular hooks, i.e. without the belly-weight. Yes I am working with Savage Gear, but I do actually fish with the stuff I talk about on here, and I seriously can’t get enough of these Gravity Sticks and the multitude of options they give me for my fishing.

So I was fishing, but the GoPro was running as well. It made no difference though to how I was fishing and I very distinctly remember almost saving a specific gully until I could fish it in the direction that I wanted the lure to swim. I made a short cast into that gully, started my retrieve, and blow me down if a bass doesn’t go and smash into my Pulsetail! I wanted to land the bass far more than worry about whether I was out of the GoPro frame or not, but when I got the thing landed I was itching to know whether I had got it all on film. As you can see in the video here it’s not exactly the most exciting fishing footage in the world because firstly it’s so wide, secondly GoPro cameras are definitely struggling in low situations with their small sensors, and thirdly I had no cutaways or B-roll to add any further interest to the film other than what you can see here. But due to a great big dollop of luck I had gone and caught my last bass of 2020 while my new GoPro was running.

It was also a good test of how a GoPro could cope with me trying to get a grip and grin of myself holding my bass, and again I can’t try and pretend that I am very happy with the result - but by pure chance I did end up capturing the capture of a perfectly decent winter bass on a lure. By pure chance as well I hooked the bass where I did, because if I had taken a few more steps I’d have been out of shot and none the wiser until I got home and dumped the footage on my computer. I had given Mark a quick shout on the radio when I landed the fish, and what I really wanted to do was get some proper grip and grins of him with my bass, but I messed up. The reason why there is no release footage of the bass in the video AND no proper grip and grins of Mark is that after I had (rather badly!) held my bass up to my GoPro I put it in a rockpool which I didn’t realise was connected to the sea, and in no time at all the fish was heading off out to sea with me cursing myself but also rather happy to see the bass swimming away so strongly. Believe you me, this is a big learning curve!

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