We are never going to land every bass we hook, but is this another way of doing it when it’s like I talked about on Monday?

There ain’t a bass that swims in our waters that can’t be landed on the 20lb braids and say 20lb fluorocarbon leaders that so many of us fish with - if everything goes your way. If you are reading this then I guess you have at least a passing interest in how awesome bass are to chase, but the simple fact is that we are not going to hook seriously big and/or powerful fish when we go bass fishing. For sure any number of things can go wrong when you are connected to the bass of a lifetime, but if I reference the two biggest bass I have landed from the shore so far, both took no 20lb braid off me and were landed in literally a few seconds on rods no more powerful than 35g……………

But everything went my way. It wasn’t rough conditions, I could beach the fish, they didn’t go the wrong way and snap my braid on a sharp rock, I tie good FG leader knots, it doesn’t remotely worry me to put a proper bend in the rods and pull the living hell out of hooked fish, and I didn’t panic. I guess those fish were meant to be. Everything went my way to be in the right place at the right time and hook up with them, and everything went my way after I hooked up. I got lucky.

Then I fish a specific sort of location in really quite bouncy conditions like I talked about in Monday’s blog post and a lot of the plans you might make if you hook a good fish sort of go out the window. I have always subscribed to landing better bass or not being mostly down to the environment and conditions as opposed to the relative size and power of the actual fish itself, and if you read Monday’s blog post I hope you will get a sense of what I am talking about here. A fairly specific set of circumstances which many bass anglers may never come across, but I do or did, and it’s the way my brain works to keep thinking about it and see if I can come up with a logical way of doing things.

I don’t think I was putting my rod under much stress by dead-lifting that particular bass!

On Monday I talked a bit about the potential of lifting bass out of the water to land them when you can’t get near the water’s edge. A lad left an interesting comment (scroll down to the bottom of Monday’s blog post, thank you Chris) about using one of those 30-100g Todos rods from Samson to deal with rough conditions and lift fish out. I haven’t seen this rod but I do actually have the Samson Long Cast Expanse 12’ 15-60g rod here to test out and see if I can get on with it. The rod arrived around the time of my heart attack and to be honest I completely forgot it was here. I am not sure what it might be like to lure fish with a 12’ long lure rod, but I am interested to give it a go and I will report back in due course. Via Chris’s comment on Monday and from watching Grant Woodgate’s videos on YouTube I get the impression that his Todos 12’ 30-100g is a powerful but easy to use lure rod which looks very capable of lifting heavier fish straight out of the water.

The exact point I would suggest that you don’t want your lure rod to be at!

One thing I learnt to do a long time ago was never say never in lure fishing for bass especially, but I don’t currently envisage myself using a 12’ 30-100g for UK bass fishing. If I saw the rod and found it very usable then like I said I am not ruling it out at all, but the chances of me connecting with anywhere near the size of some of those amazing bass that Grant Woodgate sometimes catches in SW Portugal is slim to completely non-existent. There is always the chance of a double figure bass I guess, but even then I seriously doubt that the weapon-like and very usable Savage Gear SGS5 10’ 18-56g lure rod is going to be able to dead-lift a 10lb fish. This is not a weakness of the rod I might add, but I am going to ask Savage Gear if I can get another one of these rods to put it through a controlled lifting test and see how it does. The grownups might understandably refuse my request of course, but it doesn’t hurt to ask. I didn’t pay much attention to any science lessons at school save for the odd bit of biology, but my understanding is that a shorter and more powerful lure rod should physically be more capable of dead-lifting heavier weights. Worth a go as well?

No worries lifting bass of this sort of size out if you do it properly

How about really upping your braid and leader specifically to be able to grab your mainline and lift fish up like that though? Nothing to do with the relative size of the fish I might hook, but in properly bouncy conditions and potentially on my own I am not going to be getting anywhere near the sea - so how about grabbing the (stronger/thicker) braid and dragging the fish up for unhooking? I don’t need distance and I don’t need much subtlety if I am fishing like I talked about on Monday, so why not go up to something like the 36lb or 39lb Berkley Sick X8 braid and a 0.50mm Savage Gear Super Hard Fluorocarbon leader - as I mentioned on Monday - but use this approach to literally pull the bass up to me by grabbing the braid and getting a bit of added security because it’s thicker and therefore a touch more abrasion-resistant. I haven’t fished with the 39lb Sufix 832, but considering Sufix 832 is still THE strongest braid I have ever come across I am rather liking the idea.

Hell, why not look at even stronger and therefore thicker braids which in turn would make it easier to grab and/or wrap around your hand to manhandle a fish up when you can’t get anywhere near the sea? With how thin modern braids are would we really be losing anything by going up to a 50lb mainline and commensurate leader? Nothing to do with the size of the fish as I keep saying, rather that I would always like the best possible chance of landing a bass in the many different types of location I might fish. I am sure we have all lifted smaller bass up either on the rod or by grabbing our cheesewire-like 20lb 8-strands, but for bigger fish in tricky situations? I am quite interested in the idea of loading something like a Penn Slammer IV 3500 reel up with 40-50lb braid and suitable leader and using it like I am talking about in very specific locations when it gets really bouncy…………..

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