Quite possibly the most savage ground I have lure fished for bass in the UK

We might live on a pretty small island with a high population density, but one thing we do have is a very varied coastline. On Monday I headed down into the wilds of Cornwall with a very good bass angler I know. We were going to fish a spot which he is starting to get to know, and when we pulled up in my Epic Berlingo, got our gear together and then started walking around the corner, my jaw dropped. The ground that stretched out in front of us reminded me so much of some of the bass fishing I experienced in south west Portugal - truly savage ground with endless fish holding features and also endless chances to get cut off if you time the flooding tide wrong!

Which we nearly did, but that was mainly because the bass were feeding hard in a specific area and it was bloody hard to walk away from them. A bigger tide was rapidly flooding in with a lot of fizz on the water, indeed it always amazes me how say a solid 3’ swell is so different on my local coastline to what I might find further west in Cornwall where the Atlantic has more room to wind itself up. The photos here don’t do nearly enough justice to the true scale of the ground and how brutal it is, but that’s because I could not get in front of Leigh with my cameras - too much water rolling in - and I obviously don’t want to disclose where we were fishing because it’s not fair to Leigh. With how physically demanding this ground is to fish I am going to guess that it doesn’t get fished very much anyway.

I have many weaknesses as an angler, but I like to think that a couple of my strengths are an open mind and an obsessive urge to keep on learning. Part of that urge to evolve entails watching other good anglers and how they go about their fishing. Over the course of my fishing and working in fishing life I get to spend time with all kinds of people connected to fishing, and if there is one thing I can recognise, it’s when an angler is very “connected” to the type of fishing they are doing. Bass fishing as we know is so much more than just going fishing, indeed if you take the ground we fished on Monday and compare it to say what I saw around somewhere like Hayling Island when we did some Savage Gear stuff up there last year, it’s night and day. Not better or worse, I don’t mean that. I just love how these fish we chase are so adaptable to such a wide range of ground, and I want to get better as an angler who can turn his hand to this variety.

The lad I was fishing with on Monday is much better than me at very deliberately and skillfully working those really close-in areas where the bass are most likely to be on the sort of ground we were fishing. Anybody can stand on a rock where we were and bang something like a Patchinko or a Savage Gear Gravity Shallow out and cover a lot of ground, but it takes a different skill and also a lot of confidence to spend your time literally lobbing specific lures right in amongst all the boulders and gullies almost beneath your feet. Firstly without losing endless lures, and secondly because a lot of us are almost hardwired to cover as much ground as possible. Because we can perhaps? Where are the fish most likely to be though on a specific spot?

Neither of us had a touch from a bass at any sort of range, indeed I tried covering a lot of water at times with the 16g and 23g Seeker, plus the Patchinko, the Gravity Shallow, and of course my go-to Gravity Stick Paddletails on the 6/0 belly-weight weedless hook. All good lures of course, but not a sniff on any of them when different types of lures fished very close-in went and worked. You do need to bear in mind that this was my first time fishing the place and I am sure on certain conditions there will be bass hanging around further out around the acres of structure, but I can’t ignore what happened on Monday.

The 12.5cm/28g Savage Gear Savage Minnow Weedless I was using

There was a lot of “heavy” water rolling in, and to be honest I followed Leigh’s example and fished soft plastics on jig heads right in amongst the very rough stuff almost beneath our feet. I was quite surprised to see Leigh fishing with the J-hook (i.e. not weedless) Savage Gear Sandeel V2, but he didn’t lose a lure so I guess the fact that he fishes a lot like this has given him a high level of feel and touch when he is putting lures like that in amongst the rough stuff. I went with the 13cm/33g Sandeel V2 Weedless, which worked, but the better fish I had and one which I dropped but which felt pretty good came on the 12.5cm/28g Savage Minnow Weedless. I do like how the slightly larger profile jig head and different profile on the Savage Minnow Weedless seems to help this lure when you are right in amongst it, but then Leigh didn’t lose a lure on a regular J-hook so what the hell do I know!

I have no doubt that the bonafide classic Fiiish Black Minnow would have worked really well, but I’m going with the Savage Gear stuff I had a hand in bringing to market, and Leigh is obviously going to fish with whatever he feels most confident in using. I did try a Gravity Stick Paddletail and the HTO Slim Snax on a heavier belly-weight weedless hook, but with the amount of water crashing around I didn’t feel like I was maintaining enough contact with the lures so I went back to the “soft plastic on a heavier jig head” style of lure. We had a briefish spell when there were a lot of fish around and they were smashing our lures, but because the tide was flooding so fast and there was no way up the cliffs behind us we had to get out of there way sooner than we would have liked. Leigh had another bass and I dropped what felt like that better fish on some different ground where we weren’t going to get cut off later in the flood tide (literally where that red circle is in the photo above), but it’s that initial area we fished which has been haunting my dreams in a really good way ever since……………….

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