On Friday morning I was fishing the open coast for 5.30am, ostensibly to take advantage of the first of the ebb in a bit of darkness, but then to fish a bit of that first light period, and also to be there as it got light in case any birds rocked up to feed on bait. The birds didn’t turn up when I was there I might add, but any bass fishing session where I can combine a few different “opportunities” and I’m in………….

So I did my usual stuff while it was dark - white Gravity Stick Pulsetail on the 6/0 3g belly-weight hook and/or a white DoLive Stick on the 6/0 no belly-weight hook - and then as it just started to get light I changed over to the khaki (darker) Gravity Stick Paddletail on the 6/0 3g belly-weight hook. The water was very clear and conditions were seriously flat, but I don’t mind that in the dark and there was that small chance of feeding birds later on which as we all know can happen almost anytime if there is bait such as sprat in the vicinity.

Different day but similar sort of ground

I was covering a decent bit of very good looking ground, but I remained resolutely fishless. I turned to a surface lure and really began to cover a lot of water, but still there was nothing doing. I went to pick up my rucksack and head back to where I had started fishing when it was dark, but I saw a particular gully almost winking at me and I couldn’t quite walk away. I had fished this gully a bit earlier, but the way those rocks were starting to stick out of the water as the tide dropped away made it look even more appealing.

When I used to do a good number of fishing/photography trips to the south coast of Ireland especially, we would use the Fiiish Black Minnow a lot. Contained within my vast bass fishing photo library are many big bass taken on the Black Minnow. Mainly we would turn to it when we fished runs of current in various estuaries - sink and draw, bumping it in the run etc. - then we’d go with the shallow-diving hard lures, surface lures, and various soft plastics rigged on weedless hooks when we fished the open coast during the day and at night. I don’t recall us ever really fishing with the Black Minnow away from current, although I would often turn to it back home for whacking out and winding in more like I’d fish something like the IMA Hound 125F Glide hard lure.

It was a couple of anglers on the North Cornwall coast who switched me on to this sort of “bumping” technique where you take one of those “paddletails rigged on a jig head with a weedless hook” sort of soft plastic and literally bump or swim it along the bottom over fairly shallow and very reefy and snaggy ground. I am happy to admit that I had never really thought of fishing lures like this in this way. It takes a bit of getting used to and you will lose a few lures until you get used to all the different bumps and bangs and so on, but bloody hell it can be an effective way to target bass over the sort of ground so many of us fish. Of course you will snag up now and then, but it’s actually pretty surprising how with the right shape of jig head AND the weedless (hook) design how few lures you do end up losing even when the ground is really savage. There is still one particular bass which I hooked and lost over the ground I am fishing in this blog post which still haunts me to this day. I was using this technique with the Fiiish Black Minnow. The bass went the wrong way and my braid broke around a specific little rock which sticks out of the water not long into the ebb tide. And yes, I say an ironic hello to this swine of a little rock every time I fish the place!

I don’t know how many of you know the Savage Gear Savage Minnow and Savage Minnow Weedless soft plastics, but right from the off when I started working with Savage Gear I was pushing for our own type of “paddletail rigged on a jig head with a weedless hook” lure. The Fiiish Black Minnow is an all time classic bass lure and I don’t think it will ever be beaten as a pure fish catching machine, but I had some ideas about how we could do a few things our way as such, and top of the list was me chasing a versatile jig head design which would give me multiple options on how I fished it. Poor Mads has probably never quite recovered from our back and forth on this particular topic, but it’s to his eternal credit that he came up with the awesome jig head design you find on the Savage Minnow and Savage Minnow Weedless.

For all this though I don’t fish soft plastics like these enough in the way I am talking about here morning, indeed I tend to obsess so much about various soft plastics rigged on weedless hooks which I can fish so shallow over the gnarliest of evil ground that I sometimes literally forget about the “bumping”. I obsess about bass fishing like this because it can work so well of course, but sometimes those fish are surely eyes-down and feeding on stuff like crabs and prawns and blennies. Might they then not be very interested in what we might be offering which might be trundling along either close to or actually on the surface?

We will never quite know I guess, but having covered a lot of ground on Friday morning without bothering the local bass population one single bit, I literally sort of “remembered” about bumping lures along the bottom when I went to fish that gully again. I clipped on the smaller 10cm/16g Savage Minnow Weedless which I really, really like. I went with the khaki colour mainly because I only had two of these lures in my box and the khaki was the darker coloured one and I like this for the first light period. You can guess what happened next I am sure - first cast and I let the lure hit the bottom on a controlled drop, a few turns of the handle and straight away I can feel those taps and knocks which is the jig head “bumping” along the bottom, then very suddenly there is a very fish-like bang and I hook the only bass of the session. Hardly epic fishing I grant you, but yet again it’s a change of lure and/or technique which has saved the blank. You may well fish like this all the time so you’re wondering what on earth Henry here in Cornwall is up to, but we all have specific techniques which we tend to turn to a lot because of where we fish and what tends to work for us. But I would also suggest that there are other techniques which we could all be more open to and at least remembering to adopt a good bit more!

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Such an effective technique which I sometimes almost forget about, it so often produces bass

© Henry Gilbey 2023