Such a fun start with our second group, but a rather embarrassing “guiding” moment from me!

John went right and I went left on our first mark on Monday morning with our new group of lads. I was with Dean who is an experienced bass angler on bait, but this trip with us was going to be his first ever lure fishing experience. I absolutely love this and I have already apologised to Dean for the addiction that I feel pretty confident is already starting to consume him! On our walk to the left hand side of the mark we talked about the approach we were going to start off with, and that I was going to quickly have a couple of casts with his setup because I had loaded the braid onto his new spinning reel the previous evening and I wanted to make sure it was all nice and tight and ready for Dean (who had never cast with braid before) to start fishing with……………

So I clipped on my increasingly beloved SG Slap Walker 125 (12.5cm/20g) surface lure and lobbed it out because that was the lure I wanted Dean to start with. No issues with the new braid so I started to reel the surface lure straight in, obviously without working it. I turned around to speak to Dean and explain more about how we were going to fish this particular location - while I was still reeling the lure in - and then a bloody bass went and jumped on the lure and Dean’s new lure rod (the new Westin W3 Seabass 9'1'' 12-42g lure rod, feels pretty sweet) went over in my hands. Oops! A couple of less salubrious words may have escaped my lips, but we both started laughing and I handed the rod to Dean to get the bass in. First cast of the morning and the bloody “guide” had gone and hooked a fish! How many times have you caught a fish on your first cast of a session and then caught nothing more? I was elated to know there was at least a bass around, but a bit worried about the first cast hooking a fish thing……………….

Which thankfully didn’t happen. Dean was soon working the (incredibly long-casting) SG Slap Walker 125 (12.5cm/20g) surface lure really well and he soon caught his own bass on it. I was watching Dean and keeping an eye on the water at the same time, and out of the blue I suddenly saw a bass hitting bait on the surface a fair bit further out. When it happened a second time I got Dean to quickly wind in and I changed the lure over to a SG Surf Seeker 30g metal lure. I told him what to do on the retrieve and Dean hooked and landed a bass straight away. If Carlsberg did first mornings AND your first time lure fishing for bass then this was surely it.

I could carry on here but it’s hectic as usual with this guiding stuff. We had a lovely first day with our second group and as I write this early on Tuesday morning we have made plans to have a crack at salmon today and then end up on the bass over the HW later on in the day. Salmon fishing is an option (in season, wow did we see a lot of salmon jumping the other day when we were bass fishing) if there’s been a decent flood on the beautiful stretch of river that John manages and if our anglers are happy to pull away from the coast and have a crack. Let’s see what happens and I will try and report back later in the week with how it’s going out here in this truly outstanding corner of the world…………..

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