That one small bass from yesterday morning might end up being the most exciting fish I catch all year

If size was everything in lure fishing for bass then I’d be obsessing about different species of fish. For sure we would all love a heap of 10lb+ bass smashing into our lures on a regular basis, but there is so much interesting stuff about targeting this one single species of fish that their relative lack of size has never bothered me one bit. Yesterday morning I caught one single bass which was around the 2.5lbs mark, and if I catch another bass which excites me as much as that one did it will have been a good year. The result and what it does for me so often means more to me than the size………….

I was out the previous afternoon in some stunning open coast conditions, but the whole area was completely weeded out and we were gutted. There had to have been bass there with a sea that good, but you just couldn’t get a clean retrieve. I hadn’t planned to go fishing yesterday morning, but I always wake up early. When I got downstairs and checked my phone, I found a message from a mate with what sounded like a rather cunning plan for a quick dawn raid based around the creature baits. Why the hell not?

The first few bass I caught on a creature bait will live with me for a long time - see this blog post here - but there is SO much estuary water down here in the south west which I am not fishing or which I don’t know as well as I should. A select few anglers have kindly taught me plenty about this creature bait approach to bass fishing, but it’s up to me to get myself out and about as much as possible and see what I can find. It fascinates me how a specific technique and the type of water you are then looking for results in a completely different search pattern on something like Google Earth.

So a friend and I have been talking about an interesting looking area for a while now, and recently we got around to each fishing a session on our own because of work and so on. We both blanked, but everything (that we know now but didn’t before) about this type of area screams bass, or at least it does now because I have enough confidence to approach different bits of water in different ways. My mate’s cunning plan revolved around this area early yesterday morning, but even with what I am swiftly learning about where you really can catch bass if you put the time in and go looking, an hour into the session I was fighting with my head. Part of me wanted to move elsewhere to find more water because it was getting so shallow and my head says find more depth, but enough recent experiences and Mark’s insistence kept me in place.

You can see by the photos here just how little water we ended up fishing in, but that is when I caught this bass. I had cast my MegaBass Sleeper Craw close to the (very muddy) bank and it was fishing perhaps 30-60cms out into what little water was left. We saw more fish moving around the less water there was - most likely mullet, but potentially some bass? - and Mark got hit but didn’t connect a little white earlier. Out of nowhere I suddenly saw a dorsal fin poking out of the water and moving towards where my creature bait was sitting upright in the very murky and shallow water. I crouched right down - is that really going to help?! - and tried my best to stay calm. I am pretty sure I didn’t actually feel a bite, but I was so excited my memory’s a bit jumbled! The dorsal fin then disappeared and the next thing I see but don’t feel is my braid suddenly start to move up and against what little current there was. You what? I pointed my rod down, gave it a second, then struck.

And within a split second my heart rate is through the roof and I’ve got a bass thrashing around in the muddy water right next to me. Before the thinking and approach to fishing that these creature baits seem to demand, I would never have fished where we were and in such shallow water like where we were yesterday morning. One single very modest bass has scratched a massive itch though. Catching in such shallow water and where we were has given me such a boost of confidence to keep on looking around for ground that I never even thought of fishing for bass. I have got so much to learn about all this, but isn’t that the whole point? I am 52 years old and every single fishing day is a school day. I had to go for a run after the fishing to bring my heart rate back to normal! You all have a good weekend…………..

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