No bass yet, it fascinates me how each year seems to be so different

If you take spring last year out of the equation because of lockdown and not being able to go fishing for a fair while, if I go back and look through various notes and fishing photos then it’s pretty bloody obvious that when I catch my first bass of the new season tends to vary somewhat. You cannot discount the fact that another angler around here more than likely knows more than me about where to go looking for what we might term “early bass”, but I like to think I have at least half an idea - and it’s no bass to my rod so far………….

Now admittedly I haven’t been putting in a whole lot of time for a number of different reasons, with one of them not feeling a huge amount of love with how flat and calm and clear it is out on the coast at the moment. Stunning to look at it may well be, but when you’re wading out to some rocks in the middle of the night with a read beam on your headlamp and you can literally count the grains of sand then that’s pretty clear! As much as I would love to be finding a few bass right about now, the unavoidable fact is that the conditions which tend to produce bass for us around here are not happening and there ain’t a damn thing we can do about it.

There are a bunch of different options though, from estuaries which I simply don’t know enough about in early season especially, through to night fishing of course but even so we were out the other night and it just felt completely lifeless. I think back to say the fish above which Mark had on 5th April 2019 and we had about the most perfect conditions you could want for where I suggested fishing. But it’s fishing, and in saltwater fishing especially it’s amazing how different it can be out there from one day to the next.

I’m not complaining by the way - anglers always want something they don’t currently have - rather it interests me how little I actually know about what first brings the bass inshore in spring, do water temperatures have a lot to do with it, how come different areas of the country seem to start fishing at different times, what can I do as an angler to get better at finding early fish, etc. One year I reckon I’ve got things sussed and I feel on top of my own fishing world because I made a call and caught my first bass of the year, and then the next year I do all the computations in my head, head out and blank, and realise that I actually know so little about what is really going on in nature. If you hear a yelp when you’re out fishing next, that’ll be me connecting with my first bass of the 2021 season…………..