What could I have done to connect with a few more of the (somewhat finicky) hits the other day?

A certain location in a certain estuary that gave me my second ever largest bass on a lure hasn’t been fishing well at all and I have no clue why, but as frustrating as this is, I also choose to see it as a handy way of literally forcing me to keep on looking for new marks and learning how to fish them. I find estuary fishing increasingly fascinating anyway, and the more I do it, the more I realise just how varied my approaches need to be, and just how much water there is out there that I haven’t even seen let alone fished…………

So earlier this week I was fishing on my own in an estuary. The water is a fair bit deeper than I would usually fish for bass and there tends to be a lot of current moving through on the ebb tide (I did try a new estuary mark on the flood tide the other day and it felt so strange for my lures to be moving upstream when I am so used to fishing estuaries on the ebb and the lures are obviously moving downstream, it kinda threw me!). The bottom feels like it’s a mixture of mud and bits of rock, and from almost day one of trying this spot we have been catching bass of various sizes mainly via bumping the bottom with soft plastics on jig heads.

A few years ago I’d have turned to the killer Fiiish Black Minnow when targeting water like this, but via my work with Savage Gear which absolutely fascinates me, for me it’s the been mostly the larger 12.5cm/28g Savage Minnow Weedless and 13cm/31g Sandeel V2 Weedless which have been doing the damage here. When the tides are smaller and there is less current I will often turn to the smaller versions of both these lures, but mostly the depth plus amount of water moving through has been forcing me to fish with the larger lures because the jig heads are that bit heavier. I don’t know if many of you are fishing with these new lures, but from the early days of testing various generations of samples it was interesting when we arrived at the final jig head design how the slimmer profile of the Sandeel V2 Weedless gets you down a bit faster in deeper water and helps you bump the bottom in current a touch slower if needs be. There is loads to do in the future with different weights and designs of jig heads of course, and it’s part of my job to really get to grips with this stuff.

Anyway, so I was fishing on my own and it wasn’t exactly an epic session. I didn’t get a tap from a bass until about two hours down and even then it was only a hard tap and not a fish literally jumping on the end like they so often do in strong current. A few more bumps and taps later and now I’m starting to wonder what’s going on today. There are obviously fish around and they could be very small and be struggling to inhale the larger Savage Minnow Weedless I had one, but I’ve caught a few bass on these lures which were literally no bigger than the lure itself so my feeling is that when the fish want it, they want it! Nope, it was becoming apparent that for some reason the bass were being a bit finicky…………..

I did get one particular tap and then what felt like the same fish tapped the lure a couple more times. I thought what the hell and gave it a proper strike and I hooked up. The bass might have touched the 3lb mark but it still felt like the fish had never really committed and that I’d had to chance a lucky strike to catch it. I did manage to hook another bass in that session which came off, but I had a number of taps and nudges and so on, and what really got me thinking was how differently the fish were behaving to the day before when a few of them literally jumped on the end of my lure and I almost couldn’t have missed them if I had tried (which I do from time to time!). A day apart, a slightly bigger tide which means more current moving through at this particular spot (that might sound obvious but I would argue that it isn’t always the case with how water moves in estuaries), the weather was about the same with the same wind direction, but a day apart and the bass moving through seemed to be behaving very differently. We are obviously never going to know it all because it’s called fishing, but what could I have done differently to perhaps catch a few of the bass which were nudging my lures?

I suppose the obvious choice would have been to use smaller lures when I started getting those finicky taps, but the problem I had was that in the depth of water mixed with a strong current, I wasn’t quite able to properly maintain contact with the bottom and bump the lure effectively if I dropped down to the smaller 11.5cm/22g Sandeel V2 Weedless or 10cm/16g Savage Minnow Weedless. Those were the soft plastics I had in my lure box at the time because they have been working so well for me, and something like the modular Black Minnow allows for heavier jig heads on smaller lure bodies - but I didn’t have any with me. A lighter fluoro leader might have been an option, but I didn’t believe that at the depth I was fishing it would have made any difference.

I do wonder whether a smaller-profile casting jig might have done the trick for those finicky fish. I have caught here before on some casting jigs when the water was as clear as I guess it’s going to get in a deeper part of an estuary, but it was noticeable how the smaller-profile jigs were far less effective when the water coloured up a bit more a while back and the larger-profile soft plastics on jig heads produced far better. Yep, it’s my fault entirely that I had stopped putting a couple of casting jigs in the lure box I was carrying with me, and especially when the water was nice and clear like it was earlier this week.

I have been corresponding with a very good angler I know over in Ireland, and he was telling me how he’s been fishing a mark where he needs to hit a run of current at range and work the (sandy) bottom, but then the lure needs to get back and up as quickly as possible for the journey back to him and banging the lure out again. From day one of fishing the Seeker I have tended to see it as a “whack it out and wind it in” kind of metal, and because it originated in the sea trout world it’s a metal which is designed to fish really shallow on a straight retrieve - but it’s a metal and it obviously sinks if you let it. If there is one thing I do in fishing it’s keeping my eyes and ears open to anglers who are fishing lures I know in different ways to how I might be fishing them, so I was really interested to learn from this Irish angler that he’s been rigging the Seeker as you can see above to fish wherever he is actually fishing - in order to fish along the bottom with it. He said that working/bumping the lure down the run of current saw him missing too many bass with just the one hook on the bottom, but the moment he put a single assist hook on the top he started hooking most of the hits.

As with the casting jig idea though, did I have a Seeker with me that I could have dropped to the bottom and fished it more like a casting jig? Nope! It wasn’t ever going to be an epic session anyway, but when two sessions so close together fish see the fish behaving so noticeably differently, it’s the kind of thing that really fires my brain up and gets me thinking about how I might better approach a similar situation at some point in the future. Never, ever stop learning and thinking and asking questions and talking with other anglers, that’s my thing in a big way. Any of you here got any suggestions for how I might have changed things up a bit? You all have a good weekend…………..

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