So how are you going to shake things up a bit with your fishing this year?

I don’t do New Year resolutions as such, but when those winter storms come in and the coastline goes to poo, my brain tends to start thinking about the fishing last year and the fishing that might happen this year. I can’t remember a later start to bass fishing than last year so I will be interested to see when things kick off around here this time around, but more than that I like to have a bit of a think about what I might do differently and potentially more effectively as regards my own fishing. I can’t sit still and I want to keep learning………….

There’s a very specific area of my local coastline that I had serious designs on fishing a fair bit last year, but nature had other ideas and every time I tried it was essentially unfishable because there was so much weed around. I don’t quite know why and I hear various theories to why there is more weed around than ever before, but the ground is too nice not to keep a close eye on the area and I shall be doing so again this year. Another area that three of us know about and which has chucked up some good bass has some very unstable cliffs and we need to get out there and work out if there’s another way down because the ground is too good to ignore. Google Maps only gets you so far before you physically need to get out there and put a few twinges in the old knees!

I didn’t do nearly enough night fishing last year but in my defence I did a fair bit of estuary fishing where we do just fine during daylight hours - but saying that, a spot which has chucked up some good fish for me just hardly fished at all last year and in some respects this is no bad thing because it forces me to keep on looking and trying different places. I want to get back to doing more open coast night fishing, but on the other hand I am increasingly fascinated by our many estuaries and the simple fact that I know so little about them. Night fishing with lures in estuaries with any degree of consistent success is also something that I need to get to grips with a whole lot more, and I have some very specific ideas for this year.

And then combined with estuaries is my continued niggle that I should be bolder when it comes to fishing dirtier water instead of turning away and looking for better clarity. My mate Mark’s stunning double figure bass above came from an estuary in what I would call some pretty dirty water for starters, and I am very conscious that when I do this guiding work over in Ireland that John Quinlan actively seeks out a bit of colour in the water at times. Not all colour is the same I might add, and my biggest problem on my local coastline is that when the water goes murky we tend to get a lot of weed around as well - but I need to push it a bit more because I am convinced I am missing out at times.

I want to do more surf fishing because I love it so much, and I want to push those surf conditions on the beach at night a bit more because I see no problems with bass finding the lures. There’s another area of my local coastline that has given us some good fishing at times but for some reason it seems to remain a sort of backup series of spots when in fact it’s far more than this. I need to mess around with different states of tide on marks I reckon I know pretty well, because who knows if a different time might actually be better? I want to spend far more time over in Ireland again on the guiding and fishing/photography front. To get back over there last autumn was a thrill like you would not believe. Work wise we’ve got a fair bit of stuff due to come onto the market in 2022 and the testing and thinking processes never end. I’ve got a whole bunch of hard lures here for example which I am starting to test out and report back on, and on the soft plastic lures front there is an endless amount more to do. Who knows where we might be this time next year, but on the fishing front I fully intend to shake things up a bit and see where I end up……………