Very un-epic session, but catching the one bass in the dark with a lot of moonlight shining on the water gave me a boost

I have done very little night fishing so far this year, with one of the reasons being that the various post-heart attack drugs I am on give me various side effects - I am definitely a bit more tired in the evenings. Not great for when it needs to be gone 11pm in the middle of “summer” for it to be properly dark, but now the nights are drawing in it all becomes a bit more doable. I’ll take the various side effects because I’d rather be alive and healthy I might add, but a few hours on Saturday evening was the first time for a while when I have deliberately fished into darkness…………..

I have many weaknesses as an angler, and something I am never that confident about is successfully lure fishing for bass at night when there is a lot of moonlight shining on the water. Give me a dark night or heavy cloud cover and I am as happy as can be, but I can’t recall ever doing very well when that moon is shining bright. An app on my phone says that the moon illumination was at 85.6% on Saturday evening, and as you can see from the late evening photo below before it got properly dark, the skies were clear and the moon was very much out. The actual conditions though were pretty good, and I like a nice small tide for where we decided to fish.

Andy and I covered a good bit of ground to very little effect - one hard bang on a Gravity Stick Paddletail to me, that was it - and because we have tended to do pretty well in a specific area closer to LW, we naturally ended up fishing closer together when it got dark. I got some interesting answers to a moonlight night lure fishing question I put up on my Facebook page the other day, so yet again it shows me how many different ways there are to target these magnificent fish we all love to much. My usual way to target bass on a dark night is to fish with a white lure, often a Gravity Stick Pulsetail, but also the Sandeel Pencil 90 or 125 in white as well. In my night fishing lure box I also carry the Gravity Stick Paddletail and Pintail, and I have caught plenty of bass at night on both of them, but for me the Pulsetail stands out as the killer night time lure. For me I might add again because I don’t want you to close yourself off to other lures and techniques.

I have devoured all of Marc Cowling’s recent books on lure fishing for bass, and I have obviously taken careful note to stick away in my head what he says about night lure fishing when the moonlight is on the water. Because of the locations and tides I tend to fish at night around here though, I don’t tend to fish that much when there is a lot of moonlight on the water. I have always liked the tides which come off the back of a full moon for example, and as they neap off it gets really nice and dark. Saturday night though was when it suited Andy I to be out and about and there was plenty of moonlight.

So I made a change, and if there is one thing that fishing close together and fishing with different lures at different depths - important here - shows up IF a fish or two come along, it’s what approach is working. Only the one bass came along and it happened to come to my rod, but at one point we were both fishing white lures and they’d have been pretty close to the surface with how we had them rigged. It wasn’t ridiculously bright when it was properly dark, but there was enough moonlight shimmering on the water for me to be a bit twitchy.

I had a bit of a think and I changed over to the (darker colour) khaki Savage Gear Sandeel V2 Weedless in the 13cm/31g size, deliberately to fish it essentially along the bottom and away from the surface. I can’t live or die on what just the one bass showed me, but pretty soon after this lure and depth change I hooked that one bass right after I felt the lure bang a lump of rock not far from where we were standing. Neither the size of the fish or the scrap set the bass fishing world alight, and we didn’t catch anymore than that one single fish, but me catching a bass in the dark when there was a good amount of moonlight shimmering on the surface is another boost to my confidence levels that it can actually be done………………..

Literally as I was typing this I found out that Veals Mail Order have had a good delivery of the Surf Seekers, so if you have got to here and you are one of those anglers who have been messaging me to ask when say the white 30g Surf Seeker is back in stock - they are now!

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