These incredible fish will never cease to amaze me. February estuary bass after biblical amounts of rain?

No fishing for a couple of weeks with all this rubbish weather, and I had no plans to venture out over the weekend. The open coast is in a mess, and to be honest I have been laughing/crying when I’ve been walking Storm and seeing the horrible state of the estuaries after so much rain. I do need to feel some level of confidence if I am to try and tempt a bass on a lure at a time of year when bass fishing history as such would have suggested that the rods should be gathering dust in a corner until well into spring………….

But a mate had the day off work and suggested a bit of a sniff. I was home alone last week - one girl in France, one girl in New Zealand, wife with her dad in the Isle of Wight - and I’d obviously been hoping for literally anything other than the weather conditions we’ve been getting! Lots of very wet walks with Storm and even wetter runs around Torpoint instead. I went for a dog walk at 6.30am yesterday morning and guess what? Yep, it was raining! I said to myself that I wasn’t going fishing with my mate, but then the clouds started to break while I was having breakfast and I thought why the hell not. If you don’t go you will never know.

I was very, very surprised to find the estuary water in just about okay shape, but if there is one thing that this whole creature bait or lighter/closer quarters approach to much shallower water is teaching me, it’s that I can catch bass in much more coloured water than my brain wants me to accept as acceptable. I love having to learn all the time with this whole bass fishing thing, so there was a degree of what we hoped was logical thought around where we would try fishing yesterday when it wasn’t actually raining for a change!

I notice that my mate Mark rigs up with the Nikko Craw 3.2’’ creature bait a lot of the time these days, and it’s the same with me. Ever since I first tried these amazing lures last year they have always been in that HTO Double Latch 20.5cm lure box which I use for the sort of lures I carry with me when I am bass fishing like this. I keep any of the TPE-type soft plastics in the separate compartments together - Z-Man creatures (together) in one, Nikko Craw creatures in another, Savage Gear Dragon Tail Slugs in another, then anything else in another compartment. No melting of any of the soft plastics or the lure box after months like this so I know it all works.

Details on how I am rigging up the various creature baits can be found here on my website, hope it’s useful for some of you

Anyway, when Mark shouted over that he was into a fish I will admit to initially thinking bless him, he’s hooked a bit of weed! But no, the rod was going and I ran for my camera gear whilst trying not to slip on all the bladderwrack. If you keep an eye on UK based lure fishing for bass in general then a bass on a lure in an estuary or on the open coast at this time of year might seem more normal these days. For an older fella like me though, I will never lose the sheer amazement at how fishing for this one incredible species of fish continues to change and adapt as more anglers refuse to follow out-dated traditions.

Literally my next cast after picking up my rod again after shooting a bunch of photos and I felt my cheb-rigged Nikko Craw creature bait “tap” as it hit the bottom, then a split-second afterwards I got a much harder “tap” from a fish. I instinctively pushed the rod out a bit to give the fish a smidgen of slack, then everything tightened up with the bass moving away, and I struck. I got one delightful thump then everything went slack. I’m calling it bad angling because I was a bit out of touch after not fishing for a couple of weeks!

A short while later though and I did connect with a bass. I got a few seconds of delightful thumping on the rod but then the bass swam straight into a wedge of bladderwrack. I always use barbless hooks and by the time I got out to the jammed fish it had successfully unhooked itself. I can’t count it as a caught fish, but for the 1st February and with the ridiculous amounts of rain and wind we’ve been getting? I’ll take it! My mate landed a bass, I missed a bass and then lost a bass, but that one session I hadn’t intended to fish has once again banged home to me that much more is possible in water conditions that I usually feel almost pre-conditioned to walk away from………………….

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