When you aren’t expecting many hits, it kinda helps if you don’t go missing them!

My experience with pushing much further up estuaries on the hunt for bass is limited at best, but I am loving the learnings and the associated challenges. I am very willing to be proved completely wrong, but fishing close in for moving bass doesn’t strike me as a kind of fishing where you might end up with a load of fish. What you might catch though could be rather special - saw a Facebook post from a lad who caught an 80cm bass on a creature bait the other day, how good is that, amazing fishing! - so I feel that the pressure is on to really make sure you are in the zone and on the money with how you might react to a hit……………….

So I am going to get my excuses in nice and early here! I hadn’t been fishing for a couple of weeks because of my guiding work in Ireland, so I was properly itching to connect with a bass myself. Being around other anglers catching fish is always a buzz, but when you aren’t doing it yourself I do think you can lose a small bit of “edge” with the close-quarters stuff especially, when you aren’t simply winding a lure in and a fish grabs it. Or doesn’t. The need to gauge what’s going on in a split-second and then react the right way, that to me is a skill which is earnt over time and with experience. Time away from it might dull the senses ever so slightly, and when you mix in a dose of overexcitement because you haven’t done it for a while? Excuses, excuses!

The number of mullet we were seeing was almost ridiculous. So many fish moving around in some very shallow water, but the angle of what light there was was not making it very easy at all to see into the water and properly identify if any of the fish could be bass. We keep presenting those creature baits and you hope that one of the many moving fish is indeed a bass which then chooses to smash your lure. There are obviously various ways in which you could target an upper-estuary based scenario like what I am presenting to you here, but I do think these crab imitation type soft plastics are so effective with how you can fish them so effectively so close to the water’s edge or bladderwrack and so on. Top of the ease of use tree may well be the MegaBass Sleeper Craw, but I do think that some of the Z-Man creature baits rigged on certain specific jig heads are just as effective AND you get a bit more feedback when you are working this sort of setup along the bottom.

And then I suddenly see movement from a fish which isn’t moving like any of the many mullet we have been seeing. Nothing scientific here, just that things suddenly looked different. I made sure to gently cast my Z-Man creature bait out beyond this movement and let it settle. As I then gently dragged the lure along the bottom and went to pause it, I got that unmistakable “whack” on the rod tip - and like a bloody tit I went and hit it straight away. And missed the fish. In less than a split-second I knew that I had messed it up. A few weeks ago I’d have taken that “whack”, dropped a touch of slack to the fish, and waited for the next and hopefully more positive hit - which is when I’d have hit the hit and most likely connected with the bass. Not this time though! Nope, my timing was slightly off and I messed up my one proper chance.

A little while later I had a good angle on the water and I watched as a small bass charged in on my lure but then turned away at the last moment and buggered off. I did spend a good bit of time giggling at how mullet are so spooky they end up spooking themselves, but I didn’t get another chance at a bass and my blanking was completely down to me and my mistakes. One thing I do know though is that the Favorite Black Swan 852M 8'5'' 6-24g lure rod is ridiculous as a lighter lure for bass fishing (review here). You don’t know how many different lure rods I get to try through the course of my work, and as much as there are some very lovely lighter lure rods out there and often for a lot more money, I keep coming back to how awesome this Favorite Black Swan 852M 8'5'' 6-24g is. I loved it when I reviewed it more than a year ago, but I love it even more now. If you want a damn good taste at how good this particular rod is, but for far less money, check out the incredible Favorite Totem 842M 8'4'' 6-24g lure rod (review here). Let’s be honest though, I’d have missed that one good bite with whatever lure rod I had been fishing with! Swine fish? Tit of an angler more like!

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