Targeting currents created by onshore conditions - convergence fishing?

How you “see” water moving around on open coast locations I guess is going to depend a lot on the sort of ground and conditions you might fish the most, but it always fascinates me how different the sort of coastlines I might routinely fish look in calm conditions compared to bouncy, usually onshore conditions. Sometimes it’s like you are fishing two alternative realities with how different they can look and feel…………..

I guess that most of you here quite literally read the water on the hunt for underwater features such as gullies, holes and sandbanks which might give a hungry bass the chance to snaffle a meal. What about when fizzed up bouncy water is literally being forced around and between rocks (submerged and visible) and it creates all those delicious little bits of current which have to meet or indeed converge and then create even more interesting water in which I guess any small baitfish are getting momentarily disoriented and a predator such as a bass knows exactly where to be? Can we think of it as convergence fishing?

It’s obviously very dependent on the type of location you are fishing and the conditions you have got, but this whole “convergence fishing” thing was really rammed home to me recently when I fished a particular spot a couple of times when the winds were onshore, the sea was bouncing and green, and the tides were small enough to help hold the water for longer. I go fishing and I do what I do I hope fairly naturally - think like a fish! - but it’s often not until I think about it later on or I am writing something on here when I actually analyse some of my fishing related decisions and try to work out how I can get better at this fishing thing by improving on the mistakes I think I made.

On at least four different occasions during those couple of sessions I very deliberately chose to cast my lure right into very specific little areas where localised currents created by bouncy onshore conditions were converging for various reasons - and I caught bass. At the same specific areas I fished around where I hooked the fish and didn’t catch anything, but when I had worked out what was going on because the timings of the waves revealed a picture of how the water almost needed to move, I then cast right into those tight areas where different localised currents converged - and hooked up.

Of course we whack and crank our various lures to cover as much water as possible on the hunt for bass, but how easy is it to almost ignore very specific little “happenings” because we can get so dialled into whacking and cranking? I know I am often guilty of this and it can sometimes take a couple of sessions like I had recently to almost reset my think like a fish genes. What also fascinates me is how a few bass from a specific location can sometimes get you almost rethinking the location all over again because you might have missed how specific conditions mixed with specific tides can make the place feel and fish so differently. The same spot but different.

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