So much “feel” with this lighter gear that I felt a bass literally pick up (inhale?) my lure and then reject it

The other day we rocked up to a brand new mark we have been thinking about but not fished yet, and because it’s a new spot we decided to get there earlier than logic suggested. See what might happen, that kind of thing. We ended up getting a few hours of intense rain, but before the wet stuff really came in I was pushed up fairly close to the backdrop of trees behind me as I targeted the areas of bladderwrack on the shoreline that would be high and dry in a short while with the ebbing tide………….

Even though I grew up mainly freshwater fishing and then dabbling in the saltwater stuff on family holidays in Cornwall, actual lure fishing for anything freshwater never really came on my radar. The more I look into these freshwater lure fishing tactics I know so little about though, the more I believe that much of this stuff can translate over to our bass fishing world where a more finesse approach can be useful. I can’t for example compare this “dropshot” rod I have been playing with (the Savage Gear SG8 Revenge Finesse 8' 4-18g lure rod) to other dropshot rods, mainly because I haven’t fished with any other dropshot rods, but what I do know is that in a calm and shallow environment I am “feeling” literally everything as I bump various crab imitations along the bottom. Yep, I know they should be called creature baits, but the more I watch them working in shallow water, the more I am convinced we are successfully imitating one of the bass’s primary food sources with these lures.

So I was fishing along the shoreline as opposed to casting out into the current. I was using the 3/0 10g Westin Swimming Jig Head and one of the Z-Man creature baits. My mate Mark was a good distance from me but we were carrying radios in case one of us hooks a good fish or we see something interesting on the fishing front that might help either of us catch. I cast out along the edge of the bladderwrack, snap the balearm over, let the lure settle on the bottom, and tighten up. With my rod in the up position I then sort of shuffle/bump the crab imitation along the bottom for perhaps a metre, then I stop and drop the rod tip ever so slightly to give a smidgen of slack to the lure, I count five to ten seconds in my head (thank you to Marc Cowling!), and when the lure is sitting there “claws up” I might shake the rod a couple of times like I would when wrasse fishing, then I repeat the shuffle/bumping followed by the pause and so on.

And on one of those casts when I am in that five to ten second “letting the lure sit claws up” period (with a touch of slack to the rod tip), I suddenly and very definitely feel a sharp tap and my slight bit of slack line goes tight. I can literally feel my lure coming off the bottom. Bear in mind that for a while there was no wind at all so everything on the sensitivity front was magnified even more, but anybody here would have felt what I felt and known straight away that it was a bass either picking up or literally inhaling the “crab” off the bottom. Having watched my first truly sight-fished bass hit something just prior to me casting at it the other day - check this blog post here - I could strongly visualise what I believe was going on at the end of my mainline. Be still my beating heart!

As that line went tight with the bass picking up/inhaling the lure, then all of a sudden it went slack again as the fish dropped/rejected my offering. I don’t know why the bass did this of course, but if every single hit from a fish resulted in a hookup I guess we’d all be catching a few more bass each year! I am very much learning as I am going along with this type of bass fishing in the estuaries, and for the most part the few bass I have now caught have pretty much smashed the lures. Those are the easy ones to feel though, and I wonder if in windier conditions or with less sensitive gear would I have felt such a quick and subtle “pick up and reject” kind of hit from a bass? At least you know there are some fish around which really helps with the confidence levels when you are trying a new mark. Not long after that we got very wet!

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