Plenty of bass around but I could have easily blanked, never seen them being so picky about the lure (how often are we not giving them what they want?)

If two of us had not been fishing side by side early on Saturday morning I’d love to have known what might have happened. The forecast was actually correct and overnight on Friday we got the first bit of swell/movement on the open coast around here for weeks, so by about 5.15am on Saturday morning we were out on the rocks for the first of the flood. I took a calculated punt on a stunning bit of ground which for some reason we have not fished for a couple of years now - and it was full of fish…………

Andy and I had initially moved around a bit but were struggling with a fair bit of suspended weed which can be a real problem this time of year especially. After twenty minutes or so I moved a bit west and he moved a bit east, and in no time at all I got a call over the radio to say that Andy had landed a bass first cast and had another hit straight away (why don’t more anglers carry simple two-way radios when they are fishing together, they are SO handy - I believe these ones here are newer versions of the ones I currently use). Like a gazelle I hopped over the rocks to go and find him, but after I got there and saw five bass in a row for Andy and not even a tap for me from the same bit of water, I’m starting to wonder just how crap at this fishing thing I might actually be! I was fishing with my go-to white Gravity Stick Paddletail on the 6/0 belly-weight hook and Andy was fishing with a white Sunslicker Swimish paddletail (this is not an affiliate link if that kind of thing bothers you) on a weedless hook with no belly-weight.

Many anglers say many things, me included of course, but I don’t buy this “bass will hit anything when they are really on it” thing. For sure I think this can sometimes be the case, but on Saturday morning you had two anglers literally fishing side by side in the same bit of water - and I couldn’t catch a single fish whilst Andy landed five bass right next to me and he had a load more hits which didn’t connect. I was fishing with a lure I trust implicitly because it works again and again and it’s also landed me my biggest bass ever from the shore, whilst Andy was using a subtly different paddletail in the same colour which he had done well on a few nights earlier. He was catching and I wasn’t. What the hell?

For reasons I will never quite understand, I don’t think I’d have caught a fish unless I changed things up. If I had been on my own would I have assumed that there were no bass around and I had made a bad call? I like to think I’d have changed lures and/or moved, but when you trust a specific lure and lure colour implicitly? I literally was not getting even a single tap from a fish while Andy was reeling them in right next to me, that’s how choosy the bass were being. We were both reeling nice and slow in a lovely bit of swell, but I was on for a blank unless I found something in my lure box which the bass would hit.

When I go out bass fishing over the type of ground we were fishing I will always take three types of paddletails with me - the Gravity Stick Paddetail, the Savage Minnow Weedless in both sizes, and of course the frigging lethal SG Slender Scoop Shads in the 13cm and 15cm sizes (I use the Gravity Stick 6/0 weedless hooks for both sizes). Some might say that a paddletail is simply a paddletail, but I would strongly disagree. Firstly with how different I know these three paddletails are with how they swim and do subtly different things for me in different sea conditions - the Savage Minnow is on a jig head of course so it’s obviously fishing a bit differently - and secondly that a good mate of mine was standing next to me and landing bass on a specific, rounder-profile type of paddletail which I don’t own.

So I unscrewed the white Gravity Stick Paddletail from my 6/0 weedless hook, screwed on a white 13cm Slender Scoop Shad, and whacked it out. Annoyingly this particular colour of Slender Scoop Shad is only available at the moment in what SG call a “Darker Water Mix” (which was done for the freshwater world), but I have got some of them here and you know how much I like white colour lures. I whacked it out and wouldn’t you bloody know it I hooked what felt like a decent bass my very first cast with the different paddletail. The fish dropped off right at my feet but I went and caught another one and had a bunch of bangs and pulls. By the time I had found a lure which was working we had to get off the mark and try further along because the flooding tide was going to cut us off and I could do without being stuck down the bottom of an inaccessible cliff when I was due back home soon to take my youngest girl to a running race in Exeter.

But I did get back out to the same spot on Saturday evening, and this time I was on my own. I caught a bass first cast on the white Slender Scoop Shad and then got a few hits and landed another one. There were obviously a few fish around again but they seemed to be a bit smaller than the morning - so I started playing. I changed over to a white Gravity Stick Paddletail but couldn’t buy a bite. I changed to the Pulsetail in white and fished it slowly and with lots of pauses - but no bites. I put a 13cm Slender Scoop Shad back on but in the Olive Pearl colour which does so well for us - not a sniff. I then tried the smaller 10cm/16g Savage Minnow Weedless in white - not a sniff. I even tried the Patchinko 140 surface lure because the weed was a real problem to fish through - not a sniff.

So I screwed the white 13cm Slender Scoop Shad back onto my 6/0 belly-weight weedless hook and hooked a bass straight away. A bunch of fish later in a really nice lump of swell and my brain was fried! The bass were really liking the lure on the drop as well. What on earth was going on? There were obviously plenty of bass around on both the tides I fished, but bloody hell they were being picky. My guess is that they were dialled into a very specific food source, but what freaks me out is how many times do we fish a certain lure because we trust it implicitly - but we blank and we blame it on the fact that there were no fish around. I know that John Quinlan who I work with over in Kerry for our guided lure fishing trips, well he comes originally from the fly fishing world, and I know how he subscribes to running through a few different types and colours of lures if you aren’t catching. Some anglers stick to the same lure though, and some anglers do something different again. If I had stuck to the same lure I’d have blanked both sessions on Saturday. I find this lure fishing thing eternally fascinating……………

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