What is it about how estuaries seem to fish for bass so differently to the open coast? Surely it can’t all be about current?

A few years ago now some bods from that now defunct Tight Lines fishing programme on Sky Sports contacted me to ask if they could come and film some bass fishing. The presenter Keith Arthur who is one of the nicest and most knowledgeable anglers I have ever met wasn’t going to be on the shoot but the short film I think from memory was going to be a part of one of the shows. A few of us were over on the south coast of Ireland on one of these fishing/photography trips I have done so many of and holy cow I can’t wait to get back to doing them, so I made a plan with the crew from Sky Sports to meet up with us and we’d get them out bass fishing.

Just under the 10lb mark, some bass in these conditions

I think it was August and we were beset with flat calm conditions, really warm weather, crystal clear water, east winds, and just about everything you could imagine that successfully kills just about any meaningful chance of catching bass on lures on the open coast during daylight hours on many coastlines I might target bass. This was also before the days of us really knowing much about night fishing with lures when it goes calm like that, but it wouldn’t have mattered anyway because filming night fishing wasn’t an option with the cameras and lack of lights and so on.

An incredibly talented local angler was kindly helping us out with the filming, and he made a call to meet up with the crew at an estuary mark where we would find a decent run of current, but at the last minute this lad made the call to change locations to another part of an estuary. I guess you would call it a hunch and I never questioned this bloke’s decision because he knows his local fishing far better than I ever could, but I am so glad he made that call from the filming and fishing point of view………………

Because we absolutely hammered bass, to the point where the filming over a couple of days was getting in the way of some truly epic bass fishing and when the crew flew home we were back on the spot immediately and we kept on hammering fish. I remember trying to do a PTC (Piece To Camera) to introduce the fishing but my mate Nick kept on hooking bass in the frame and I’d go down to help land the bass and yap about it on camera and so on. I finally got a few minutes without fish being landed to do the PTC which you always want to do as an OTW (One Take Wonder) if you can, so I could then fish myself and I hooked and landed a good bass on my first chuck. It was the sort of bass fishing you dream about really, but as I was saying earlier, the conditions were about as bad as they could get for open coast fishing yet we had some amazing fishing and the film crew got what they needed.

So what is it about estuaries and how they so often seem to fish completely differently to the open coast? Is it simply a case that a run of current in some respects cancels out what tends to kill bass fishing out on many open coasts during daylight hours? I remain convinced that a run of current has a lot to do with it even if I don’t really know why, but surely it’s also something to do with what the bass are feeding on in estuaries and how those food sources behave during daylight hours? I don’t know if you see some of the amazing bass some of the French lads catch in some of the estuaries over there, often via sight fishing, but I do notice how in all the photos it’s daytime and often bright and calm looking as well. As ever I would suggest that even if the growing crop of social media experts profess otherwise, there is a lot about fish and fishing that we don’t know.

Estuaries are not all about fishing current though. How about fishing soft plastics and surface lures around the edges of bladderwrack when there isn’t an appreciable current running? I go and do this in the sort of conditions I’d only be out on my local coastline at night, but because it’s estuary fishing things often seem to be a bit different with how bass might or might not feed or take lures. Do you remember that really hot and warm summer we had a few years ago? My mate Mark made a really good call on an estuary mark from which we ended getting some really good fishing until an angler kindly decided to go and blow it for us, but that aside I remember a lot of east winds, calm and very clear water, warm weather, to the point that things were so flat and lifeless that even the night fishing out on the coast had died a death. But the estuaries were fishing. Why? You all have a good weekend, I’m guessing it’s going to get somewhat busier down here in Cornwall over the Bank Holiday weekend and half-term next week, but in my humble opinion there are a lot of people who damn well deserve a bit of a holiday or time away from home where we have all spent that bit too much time over the last year and a half or so…………….