There’s estuary fishing for bass, and then there’s ninja-style estuary fishing for bass (nice fish!)

I have been doing at least some of my bass fishing in estuaries ever since these amazing fish started to completely consume me. For a long time the bulk of that estuary fishing was based around the last few hours of the ebb tide towards the mouth of an estuary, bumping something like a MegaBass XLayer or something similar rigged on jig heads in the current. Something I still do a good bit of I might add, but as with this whole lure fishing for bass thing, if you keep an open mind and an unquenchable urge to keep discovering and learning, it’s amazing where this one species of fish can take you……………

One thing I deliberately choose to do with my fishing is mix things up a bit to try and find out more about specific marks. Not that far from where I blogged about the other day, I have deliberately tried different sizes of tides and found out that there don’t seem to be any fish moving around on the smaller neaps. So on Sunday morning I came up with a different plan for somewhere I don’t mind at all on really small tides, but what the places do have in common is that they are quiet. Banging lures out in a strong run of current or a hectic bit of surf is so different to areas where the bass and mullet are potentially going to be mooching around the shoreline sometimes less than a rod length out from the bank. It’s why I am continually searching for potential ninja-style estuary fishing spots in areas that do not see people and dogs and noise and so on. I think it makes a huge difference. The further you walk and all that?

Anyway, so on Saturday morning Mark and I ourselves almost crab-crawling along the bank of an estuary, a good distance back from the water’s edge. It’s so interesting how much more you see when it’s calm and there is nothing to disturb how the fish want to move around. Stand up suddenly and it becomes apparent what was mooching around and just how close in those fish can be when they spook, and whilst the majority of them do tend to be mullet, where there are mullet I trust that there will also be some bass.

I suddenly saw some fish tailing in amongst the gaps in the bladderwrack. And what is tailing I hear you ask? I first came across the term when I started to photograph saltwater fly fishing for bonefish in places like the Bamahas and Venezuela and so on. Bonefish nose down feeding on prawns and crabs and so on, in water so skinny (shallow) that their tales stick out of the water. When that sunlight catches those tails it’s something else, as per the photo above which I shot on a remote island in the Bahamas many moons ago.

And on Saturday morning as I was hanging right back from some very calm and quiet water, I saw a few tails sticking out of the water and moving around. They looked like mullet which were head-down and rooting around on the bottom which produces those telltale scrapes in the mud as per the photo above, but I also had a suspicion that one of the tails might well be a bass. You know when you see a few mullet moving around but something just looks a bit different? It was like that.

I continue to carry a couple of those very clever MegaBass Sleeper Craw creature baits with me, but because I can control the size of the lure and/or the hook, the weight of the jig head, and the sharpness of the hookpoint that much easier, I find myself turning to the separate creature bait/crab imitation and separate weedless jig head more and more. I really like the Z-Man Turbo CrawZ 4'' creature bait with how it works around a decent size 3/0 or 4/0 weedless hook, Z-Man lures last and last, the colours are good, and on the right setup it sits bolt upright and those “claws” I believe look pretty irresistible to a hungry bass. The setup in the photo above is what worked in the paragraph below.

So I cast out beyond the tailing fish and let the lure settle on the bottom in water that can’t have been more than a foot deep. As I started that gentle sort of shuffle/pause/tap retrieve along the bottom towards the edge of the bladderwrack and the tailing fish, it suddenly happened. If lure fishing for bass is so much about the hit, then the hit from a fish which is feeding head-down and which you need to gauge how to deal with in a split-second is electric. Very easy to miss - as per me yesterday afternoon when a bass started to pull the lure away and I struck too early - but so wonderfully satisfying when you choose to strike and your rod goes over and stays over. Which it did on Saturday morning, and the bass turned out to be around the 6lb mark. A perfect start to a day which produced a bit of a damp squib finish to the Lions tour.

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