So easy to spend your time blasting lures to the horizon when in fact the fish were in the gutter almost beneath my feet

Yesterday afternoon wasn’t an epic session, indeed I gave myself a proper bollocking when I headed for home. One chunky winter bass landed, but two bass came off and one felt pretty decent, and I had one very hard hit on the drop which I wasn’t really expecting and which I spectacularly missed. There were fish there and I caught, but it could have been better if I had fished a bit better……………

How do you “compute” where you go fishing? Certain tide sizes tend to get me thinking about the potential for various marks or areas, and of course the conditions on the open coast especially narrow things down. I chose my mark yesterday based on a number of different factors - I do love a short, onshore sea - but I also had a couple of backup places in mind if I ended up finding very coloured water or loads of weed and so on. When I got there it all looked good, and as much as there was a lot of ground to cover if you wanted to, even amongst all that loveliness there was a specific bit that I was always going to make sure I was fishing as the tide started to ebb. The more you fish specific areas, the more you learn their intricacies.

So I start off by covering a lot of ground with your typical paddletail on a belly-weight hook sort of thing. Long-casting but retrieving to my feet, and moving around. For me it’s most likely going to be the Savage Gear Gravity Stick Paddletail on the 6/0 belly-weight corkscrew hook we made for them, or else the 13cm or 15cm Slender Scoop Shad which also sits nicely with the same hook (but I LOVE the Slender Scoop Shads on those Decoy Violence VJ-36 jig heads, check here for the sizing info). I like and trust these particular paddletails as much as you most likely like and trust any number of different and also very good paddletails.

6’’ OSP DoLive Stick on a 5/0 BKK Armor-Point Permalock hook

I also rigged a 6’’ OSP DoLive Stick up on what I think is THE best weedless hook I have used for these incredible twitch-sticks - the BKK Armor-Point Permalock (I really like the 5/0 size for the 6’’ DoLive Stick and the 4/0 for the smaller 4'.5’’ DoLive Stick). When I initially bought these hooks they were not easy to find, but I have just done a search and I found them here in the UK (and somewhat cheaper than when I bought them from somewhere in Europe as well!).

Anyway, I didn’t bother the scorer to start with but I was always working my way towards this specific little section of the big area where there tends to be a big gully scoured out as the rocks give way to a bit of beach. How much gully there is depends a lot on how much sand has been shifting around with various storms and spring tides, but I could tell from the shape of the waves rearing up a bit more and dumping down that there was plenty of gully to fish. If I was going to catch then this was where I felt the most confident.

When I am fishing a place where I need to specifically put lures into a gully almost beneath my feet, I tend to turn to soft plastics rigged on jig heads. Fiiish Black Minnows, Savage Gear Sandeel V2 Weedless and Savage Minnow Weedless, those types of lures. I want the paddletail, but I want a bit more weight and at the front of the lure to hold me as long as possible where I think the bass are going to be feeding. Not only can I get down a bit faster with the weight at the front of the lure, but it holds me better in the turbulence and I can also bump the bottom. Very importantly I can also “hold” the lure for those split-seconds as the water strips back.

And what is one of the things I start doing way less of when I am targeting specific ground very close to the shoreline? Casting shorter. If there is any weed in the water then my theory is that the longer your lure tracks through the water, the more chance you have of picking weed up. If I carry on blasting my lure out but my real intention is to fish very close to the shoreline, surely I risk some weed on my lure MORE than if I was to gently cast the lure out just beyond the gully and start fishing it?

Because of all this ninja-style estuary fishing I have been doing, I also find myself naturally standing back from the water’s edge when I first start fishing this gully. In time I will move closer to the water or end up standing on certain rocks out in the water to get an angle on where I want to fish with the dropping tide, but I don’t think it hurts to hold back a bit for those first few casts at least. As I am trying to almost hold the paddletail rigged on the weedless jig head as the water sucks back off the beach, I get that glorious tap, tap - and I strike. In no time at all a plump winter bass around 3lbs+ hits the beach and I can easily nudge the barbless single hook out of its mouth and return it. No measuring, no photos, I know I caught it and I don’t want to waste fishing time.

In due course I hook another bass so close in that I am surprised I didn’t see the fish take the lure, but it comes off. I got a few more bumps which came to nothing, and then I hooked what felt like a better fish which thumped its head in the gully a good few times and bloody well came off. I do think that with this very close-quarters style of bass fishing that you are going to drop or miss a few fish because their window to hit the lure so close to the beach and in that turbulence is smaller than if they were tracking it for a while. I don’t actually know this for a fact by the way, but that is my current thinking - which might actually be an excuse for me not fishing very well!

I ended up moving to access a bit of deeper water a little further out, and I stayed with the same weedless jig head approach because I wanted to try and keep swimming my lures through various gullies which I know are there because I have deliberately walked around this big area at low tide in the past, looking for specific features. What I didn’t bank on was getting absolutely walloped on the drop, and I wasn’t quite ready for it. I had to strike even though I instantly knew I had messed up, but we live in hope I guess and I didn’t connect. I never had another sniff of a bass but the light ended up going a bit loopy and I managed to shoot a few photos. One of those winter sessions that really gets me thinking…………

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