Nothing like fishing to bring you crashing back down to earth!

One of the things about saltwater fishing which has always fascinated me is us as human beings needing to compute in our human brains where to go fishing on a given day or night. Our human brains are trying to outwit the natural world. Luck is always going to play a big part in fishing and I have never had a problem accepting that - it’s why I don’t compete or feel competitive with my fishing - but when you do go out and catch fish, to me there is a such a thrill that you have made the right call…………

You will never know if it’s the best call you could have made because you can only fish one spot at once and you won’t know if somewhere else might have fished better again, but when I compute where to go fishing and I catch or whoever I am fishing with catches? It’s such a buzz. When you use what you believe you know to pull a load of information together and a fish grabs your lure, sips your fly down, or homes in on your bait, that to me is a kind of validation that you actually are an angler. I go running a lot these days but it’s taken me a long time to see myself as a “runner”, but I’ve been fishing all my life and I definitely see myself as an angler or a fisherman. Hell, it’s my life.

So that 76cm March bass I managed to land last week - damn right I was over the moon to see a fish like that in March, but almost more thrilling was the fact that I computed what I like to think I know about the various influencing factors to come up with a plan. The plan was to be at a specific location at a specific time to take advantage of a specific part of the tidal cycle. Bigger bass are obviously a big thrill if you fish for bass, but almost more so was the fact that within five casts I had validated my computing in just about the best possible way. I could have come up with a different plan and that plan might have worked better on the day, but I had to have done something partly correct to connect with that one bass. I love that side of fishing.

I am sure you can imagine the confidence I felt when I headed out fishing yesterday afternoon then. For various weather and work related reasons I hadn’t been out since that rather special fish from last week, but had the capture of that one bass seen my internal computing skills elevated to another level? A part of me naturally liked to think so, but after four hours of thrashing various lures around in some fairly good water, I had been very definitely brought back down to earth with a resounding thump! It’s amazing how good fishing is at humbling us when the Fishing Gods decide that we need it. For sure I loved scrambling around in a bit of sunshine and more sea than I expected to find - we chose not to go with our original plan because the water was pretty coloured there - but it was 31st March and I can’t expect to catch bass in March. I felt full of confidence anyway, yet I was brought crashing back down to earth and made to feel like what I was - a human being using a human brain and failing to get one over on the natural world. There is always next time though, so I am heading out now for a 5k run with the dog, and while I am running/trundling/floundering around a bit like a crippled giraffe, I will be computing where to go fishing afterwards. Because it’s a drug. Hell, running’s a drug as well. Who the hell needs real drugs when you’ve got good stuff like fishing and running to consume your life? Happy Easter weekend, are we ever going to get anything resembling that thing called spring?