New ground, incredible conditions, fish around……………...and full of weed (somebody up there doesn’t like us very much)

I recently came across some local open coast ground that for some reason I didn’t even realise was there, with thanks to my wife who couldn’t park where she wanted to with our girls a while back (tourists eh?!), so she had to go to a different beach and ended up finding a way down. They suggested heading out there for a barbecue on the beach the other evening and I obviously had a good look around because the ground looked so nice for bass fishing and I had some time while the charcoal got up to temperature. I vowed to myself that the next time we got some bouncy sea conditions around here I was going to head back down there with my fishing gear………..

So I did, indeed early last week I was literally running down the path with my sheepdog Storm because the conditions looked so good. If there had been anybody else around I would have been gobsmacked, and sure enough I had the place to myself. Second cast with an IMA Hound 125F Glide which I had put right between two rocks and I got walloped but the bass didn’t connect, and over the next hour or so I moved around as much as I could to try and get away from the mass of weed in the water until I gave up and accepted that I simply was never going to get a clean cast. Spring was awesome and bloody hell did we need weather like that during lockdown, but I have to assume that so much warm weather relatively early in the year has promoted an incredible amount of weed growth - every single time we get a sniff of good open coast conditions around here and the water’s full of weed.

First thing this morning was surely going to be different though, because we are eternal optimists and we tend to expunge it from our memories when things didn’t go right last time around. It wasn’t though. Conditions from the top of the cliffs looked utterly sublime and we were down there in a flash and with the grace of a couple of gazelles frollicking on the African plains. The first area we tried was so full of weed I couldn’t get any kind of lure through there, so Mark and I moved further along. There seemed to be a smidgen less weed and in no time at all at a location I can’t believe has been almost right beneath my nose, Mark hooks and lands a smallish bass. I move to his right and manage to get one weed-free cast and hook up with a fish that comes off beneath my feet. We both had a couple more bangs but it quickly became apparent that we were fighting a losing battle against so much weed in the water.

Ideally I want to be fishing around the edge of the boulders here but you couldn’t do it this morning with so much weed around, so the next plan was to try a Patchinko across the top and see if it was fishable like this. It wasn’t, so I clipped a 28g Savage Gear Seeker on and put it out as far as I could to see if I could kinda get in behind the weed. I couldn’t. Still, I am a few sessions in now with this rather amazing new lure rod, the Shimano Lunamis S96M 9’6’’ 7-35g, so at least I could carry on enjoying getting to grips with it. How Shimano Japan keep on making lure rods that suit me and how I fish so well is beyond me, but from a bit of time now with this thing I am completely blown away by it. Review to come, but as it stands right now I am not looking forward to this Shimano Lunamis S96M 9’6’’ 7-35g lure rod going back at all. However good it is though, it can’t magic us through so much weed in the water and I think I need to get away from the open coast and keep on exploring some of this amazing estuary ground we have stumbled upon………..

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