Boxing Day bass - how many things needed to come together to catch that one decent fish?

If the world was like it was twelve months ago then I’d be on the Isle of Wight with my in-laws for a few days over Christmas, but things are very obviously not normal at the moment, and we spent our first ever Christmas Day as just the four of us here in south east Cornwall. I wasn’t going to put a blog post up until New Year’s Day, but I went out fishing on Boxing Day morning with Mark and I managed to land a good bass around the 7-8lbs mark. I hope you know enough about me by now to know that I only really talk to you about certain fish I might catch if I think there is something interesting about the process and/or result, and that one good fish on Boxing Day really got me thinking about the few hours we spent putting our lures out into some rather lovely conditions before that storm came in and blew things out again on Saturday night…………….

I did get very excited a few days ago when I had a look at the local webcam and saw what seemed to be some rather tasty conditions. I had a quick drive out to the coastline to check things out before I committed to fishing it, and I was rather glad I did - I love foggy and mizzly weather for bass fishing, but when I could get a proper look at the water I saw that it was absolute filth. I went back home, got on with some work, and to be honest I wasn’t holding out much hope of getting much fishing in over Christmas with how bad that water had looked. On Christmas Eve though I got a call from Mark to say that he had been out walking with his dog and he reckoned by Boxing Day it could be worth a go. Why the hell not and beggars can’t really be choosers at this time of year.

The forecast dictated that we needed to get out over the LW on Boxing Day morning, before the really bad stuff came in, and because we have just gone into Tier 2 down here I arranged to meet Mark at a parking spot near to where we planned to go fishing. Storm knows the path down and raced on ahead, but Mark and I stopped and had a good (socially distanced!) look at the conditions before we continued on. It’s not actually a part of the coastline that I tend to fish much on the early flood tide, but it’s some stunning ground which lends itself to moving around and working the many gullies and features and so on. What was really interesting to see was that there were a couple of very noticeable holes/gullies which had obviously been scoured out a lot more by the recent weather.

The simple fact is that on Boxing Day morning I was the lucky angler who caught this single bass. It could just as easily have been Mark, indeed I have seen him pull plenty of winter bass out from the area we were fishing. What’s got me thinking the most about that one good bass is how many things I guess needed to come together for me to be the lucky angler. There had to have been more bass around with the conditions we had, and I am sure I had a follow or two, but when only the one fish is caught from such a large area of ground that we were covering, I think about the decisions I made on Boxing Day morning and I wonder what would have happened if I hadn’t made those decisions………..

First off Mark and I had come to a decision on where to fish based upon a number of factors. I’d tend to head slightly east on this particular mark or area of ground if I was fishing it around LW, but because of what the recent winds had done we couldn’t help but get down there and start working our way towards those “new” features - they looked too good. There were a few patches of coloured looking water dotted along the coastline, and if we had had other options we might have turned away and gone elsewhere, but it’s winter and options are more limited. Mark and I decided that with the good bit of sea rolling in and the forecast for later on, we had to fish it, and although the first hour or so of the flood was very quiet, in fact the water was looking better and better as we worked our way towards those features we had spotted on the way down. Mark got to a particularly good looking bit of water so I made my way around the back of him to head a bit further down, but as I was walking I noticed a gully that just looked really tasty with how the white water was rushing in and bouncing all around the rocks. I stopped to have a good look, with the intention of walking on and coming back to it further into the flood, but whatever it was in my head got me to stop, put my bag on a rock, and give this gully a go right now.

A few casts later and I saw a wave wash over and then expose the top of a rock which I hadn’t yet seen in the increasing amount of turbulence, so on the next cast I put my lure just in front of that rock, snapped the bale arm over on this rather lovely Shimano Vanford 4000XG, and started my retrieve. Four or five turns later and everything goes gloriously solid, but for a split second I thought I’d snagged the rock I had cast at - until I felt the headshake. I got lucky in October and landed my biggest ever bass, but this 7-8lb bass from yesterday gave me by miles the best scrap from a bass that I have had in 2020. I reckon I hooked it about forty yards out and I put as much pressure on it as I could, because if the fish went only a few yards left or right my braid would end up around a lot of rocks and I’d have lost the fish. Mark must have heard my yelp because he kindly dropped his gear and came running over, and when he got to me I had the fish landed and in a rockpool ready for a few photos.

You can obviously only catch a fish on the lure you are fishing with so I will never know if the bass I caught on Boxing Day morning would have hit or refused a different lure to the one I caught on. When I first started fishing with the Savage Gear Sandeel Pencil lures in the 125 and then the 150 sizes, I thought of them mainly as lures for surf fishing, but my thoughts on these long-casting and easy to fish lures have changed a bit. Over a fair amount of time with the 90, 125 and 150 versions now I have been playing around with (straight) retrieve speeds and seeing how slowly I can wind them without snagging up over shallowish, broken ground like we were fishing over on Boxing Day. As long-casting, shallow-swimming hard lures which in fact look more like soft plastics when they are swimming, I find myself turning to these Sandeel Pencils more and more these days. Less action in the water is often so much more it seems, and I like how you can get slightly different swimming actions from these lures depending on the speed you retrieve them.

I caught my Boxing Day bass on the largest Sandeel Pencil, the 30g 150, and whilst I will never know if that fish would have hit another lure at that precise time in that precise place, what made me really happy was that I had the confidence to trust in my thought process and clip that particular lure on because the conditions and ground were exactly why I had put some of the bigger Sandeel Pencils in one of my lure boxes. A good bit of bounce, shallowish ground, a mixture of rocks and sand, and although we are talking about a sinking 150mm lure which weighs 30g, it’s easy to swim all these Sandeel Pencil lures nice and shallow if needs be. They can also work well on much faster retrieves I might add. They cast incredibly well into headwinds, and for shallow-swimming lures they are very stable. I think the extra weight of the 150 version really helps cope with rougher conditions over shallowish ground. When I am fishing the Sandeel Pencil 150 like I would a conventional shallow-running hard lure, I have it rigged with a #6 treble in the middle and a #4 treble on the rear. All barbs are crushed.

That scrap from that bass will live with me for a long time, but would that one fish have been caught if everything hadn’t somewhat luckily come together at a precise moment? I love thinking about stuff like this and I am perfectly happy to accept that I will never actually know. I hope you all had the best Christmas possible. If all goes to plan and something doesn’t go wrong with the changeover then on New Year’s Day I will go live with my revamped website. My local coastline is once again in a bit of a mess after that storm the other night, but it should clear up soon with the forecast, the water doesn’t feel very cold yet, there are obviously some fish around, I have so much interesting gear here that needs using and testing, so duty calls and I shall keep on trying for a few bass on the lure gear………….

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