We took a bass from the open coast out in Ireland for our anglers to eat, guess what it had in its stomach?

Before breakfast on our last morning with our second group of anglers, we headed to what is a truly stunning open coast mark. It’s rare on this spot that the sea is so calm you can get right down on the rocks to fish, especially in October, but from my initial ferry getting cancelled due to that storm to seriously flat seas, we have seen all kinds of weather over the last couple of weeks or so. Including flat calm…………

I choose to return the bass I catch myself, but if I ate fish I can assure you that I would be taking the odd one to eat. Our anglers were keen to have bass for supper with both John and his wife being such good cooks. In due course the “right” size bass of about 3lbs was caught and dispatched, to go with another bass about the same size we had taken the day before. When the food came out for supper it looked so good even I was tempted to have a go at some fish!

Anyway, of most interest to me was that the single thing in the stomach of the open coast bass was a shore crab. I guess that something like a sandeel is going to digest faster than a crab, but where this particular bass was caught was nowhere near any estuaries, and the fish itself definitely had the colouration you tend to see on the open coast. Yet it had still been feeding on crab at some point (John was telling me that some pollack they caught from the boat and took to eat earlier in the year had been stuffed full of crab). I am not going to suggest the obvious as regards lure types, but I have been thinking about it for a while and I have been fully intending to experiment with things if and when I get in amongst a bunch of fish. I’d be interested to see what might happen at night for example when I am fishing a gentle surf on a beach…………