We have to go and find our fish, and I would suggest that making a call which then produces fish is one of the biggest thrills in fishing

I’ve been fishing for more than forty years and for some reason it’s saltwater fishing that has floated my boat the most during that period - and of course it continues to do so. I don’t enter into any pointless arguments about which type of fishing or specific species of fish is the best to fish for because it’s all fishing at the end of the day, and surely what is so good about fishing is that there is room for us all. I can’t pretend that I have a huge desire to spend weekends in a bivvy chasing a species of fish that grows considerably larger than anything I am ever likely to hook on a lure in UK waters, but a lot of anglers do, and the fact that something like carp fishing or fly fishing for stocked trout on stillwaters or trolling for sailfish does it for a lot of anglers is pretty damn cool in my book. There is every chance that those anglers would look at what obsesses me and wonder why I chase a species of fish which let’s face it doesn’t grow very big and isn’t about to empty a reel…………...

You know that I think bass are an awesome species of fish though, but with how “big” they grow, my obsession with fishing for them can never be about size or power of quarry alone - not when I think about fishing on a more global scale due to my work and filming experiences over the years. Nope, there has to be more to something like lure fishing for bass than just the fish. Lure fishing is so much about the actual hit from a fish for example, indeed I could write books about trying to break down the sheer thrill of that jolt down the rod and through your body when a fish bangs into your lure.

But what about the hunt? What about the whole crux of the sort of fishing so many of us here love to do? We have no choice but to get out there and try to find what can sometimes seem like the proverbial needle in a haystack. There is obviously something highly addictive about say carp fishing, but unless my understanding of this side of fishing is completely wrong you are often almost laying out a buffet and trying to bring hungry fish to you. For sure you’re targeting an area where fish are known to frequent, and of course the search for surface-feeding carp is a bit different again, but surely by putting a lot of food into the water you are trying to attract fish to your spot which might be somewhere else and which might take a lot of time? This is all good by the way, I am not having a go at carp fishing at all, rather I am using the way I understand this fishing to help illustrate my point…………..

Which for me is the ridiculous thrill I still get from thinking about tides and seasons and wind direction and sea state and water clarity and moon phase etc., and then entering these factors into my brain and coming up with an answer on where to go fishing. I make that call and I would like to add that of course it doesn’t always work, but when I do make that call on where to go fishing and I then catch fish? To me this is just about the biggest thrill in fishing. For sure I might have gone somewhere else and caught more or bigger fish, but that’s beside the point - when we use whatever knowledge and skills we might have to make a call on where to go fishing, if I catch a fish or multiple fish it means that I have got it right in some way. I made a good call. I was never very good at exams at school or university - too much fishing and drumming and sport and female distractions perhaps? - but the decision on where to go fishing is a bit like a test to me. Catch and you pass, blank and you fail.