When nearly everything is perfect but you’ve got a little niggle……

I don’t obsess about spring tides for bass fishing, not with how differently so many places I like to fish seem to behave - but I do obsess about conditions. And yesterday we found what I would call 100% perfect conditions for where I had been thinking about fishing, then made the call to go there as the forecast firmed up. If it had fished well I wouldn’t have been writing this blog post, but I am……………

I literally had to calm myself down and make sure my heart rate didn’t spike too much when I got to see the sea yesterday morning. Goddam it looked good, with exactly the right shape and colour I had hoped to find for where I had decided to fish. I have tended to do pretty well at this spot in the past when the sea has looked like this, but mainly on bigger tides than the miserably small ones we had yesterday. If there had not been so much sea running I’d have most likely chosen a different mark that I actively like on really small tides, but in my mind the forecasted sea conditions dictated to me that I needed to fish where we ended up. And hope that the small tides didn’t mess things up too much.

All looked pretty good when Dave hooked and landed a bass right at the start of the session on one of his Labrax Mafia (pink!) Morsetto 115mm paddletails rigged on a Decoy Violence VJ-36 jig head. Because the light and sea conditions looked so incredible I wasn’t even fishing yet, and instead I was crouching down and firing away on my camera gear. Sometimes it all goes right and the angler hooks a fish while you are lined up like this, and Dave did. I got a bunch of photos you can see here which I am really pleased with. I love it when the winter light gets really interesting and the sea is lovely and bouncy and the angler is fishing right in amongst it.

So of course we fished on with real purpose, but that one bass right at the start was the only fish we had. Nearly every single thing screamed bass at us, but the longer we went without any more fish, the more the really small tide thing began playing on my mind. You know how you look for a variable when the fishing doesn’t go to plan? Of course I don’t actually know if the small tide was THE single reason for a lack of bass there yesterday, but I do know that this place has worked well for me on bigger tides because I believe the bass can access a specific area where I think that any bait is basically forced into. That didn’t quite happen yesterday with there being less water. I know it’s nearly Christmas and any day on the coast in good conditions at this time of year is to be embraced and not complained about, and to be perfectly honest I am as happy to come away with photographs that I am really happy about as I am a bunch of bass. I do love it when both things happen though! Too much to ask at the end of December?

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