When you have no choice but to hook and hold a bass, it’s interesting how they often submit so quickly

You know my feelings about drag settings for our bass fishing and how it’s my belief that 99% of lure anglers donate far too much line to their hooked fish here in the UK and Ireland, but what about those odd occasions when you might genuinely have no choice but to lock down tight and stop a bass from taking any line at all regardless of how big or small it might be? I’m talking about fishing places where you seriously don’t want any of the bass you hook to be able to take any line because if they do it’s a nine out of ten chance you’re going to get broken off. Not because bass are particularly dirty fighters I might add, rather that where you are fishing might be rather unique and in most directions there’s various bits of structure just itching to cut through your line and ruin your day or night…………….

My mate Mark has had a bit of a thing about a particular spot that he’s been itching to scratch recently, and when I was away for a few days with my wife and girls he landed a cracking 72cms bass amongst a few other nice ones. Scratch successfully itched you could say, and we got to fish the place together on Monday evening - holy cow do you not want any bass you hook on a certain part of the mark to be going anywhere at all when you hook them. I’d love to tell you more about the ground but for obvious reasons I can’t, safe to say it’s somewhere I’d never have thought to go looking for bass and I give Mark all credit for the bass I have now landed from there.

If this one particular bass had been a monster I’m not sure quite what would have happened, but I was fishing one of these rather lovely Fishus Lurenzo Espetit surface lures in the 11cm/16g size, and when I say the bass smashed the lure literally right off my rod tip, I am not exaggerating. I saw a dark shape come out of nowhere and almost before I knew it my rod tip slammed over and what turned out to be a 5lb 8oz+ bass very quickly came up against my reel drag which was wound down completely tight. Note that my drag does get loosened off a bit when I am fishing other parts of this mark, but I had taken the decision to wind everything down as tight as it could do for when I was standing in a very specific spot, and it was where I happened to hook this fish. The bass was essentially beaten in a few seconds and it actually took longer trying to make a bit of room for myself and the rod to manoeuvre it into this rather clever McLean Short Handle Weigh net which I am really starting to like (it’s so bloody easy holding a net up with the fish in and the weigh-scale is actually in the handle of the net).

Now it could well have been one of those bass that for whatever reason doesn’t want to do that much, but whatever the case, it was noticeable how quickly the fish submitted against a lure rod which was bent right over and no line was coming off the reel. I have seen this happen plenty of times now with bass. My argument tends to be that when you pull the hell out of a fish like a bass, they don’t like it very much, and I reckon you can often break them pretty quickly. I love our bass above all other fish, but they simply haven’t got the speed or stamina of something like a tuna or a tarpon and so on, and if you have no choice but to bend the hell out of a typical lure rod because you need to hook and hold a bass, I do fancy my chances of being on the winning side more than I do letting the fish run and if it runs the wrong way I haven’t got a hope in hell of landing it. I also don’t subscribe to pulling hooks out of bass’s mouths if you fight them too hard.

What would have happened if that particular bass had been say 10lb+ and not under the 6lb mark? It wouldn’t have made any difference to how I fought the fish because of where I was fishing and what I think I need to do to land bass there, but I still fancy my chances of hooking and holding a far bigger bass than the one I happened to hook and land on Monday evening. I had a few other fish but they weren’t hooked from this “no line given” spot and I could pull them as I usually would and with a normal drag setting. Save for trying stuff out for review, I don’t tend to fish that much with what might be termed “lighter bass rods”, but I have recently got hold of one of these Shimano Lunamis S90ML 9’ 6-25g lure rods for a bit of a test and I can’t bring myself to put it down because I am loving it so much and it can do a lot of my fishing. I need more time with this rod, but the more I fish with it, the more it feels like Shimano Japan have made this 6-25g Lunamis fish somewhat like a lighter version of my beloved Shimano Exsence Genos S90MH/R 9' 8-48g lure rod; potential perfection. Having seen how that sub-6lb bass gave in so quickly on this rod on Monday evening I’d love to get the chance to have to hook and hold a much bigger bass because I see no reason why the rod wouldn’t have the better off the fish. Fishing is fishing and anything can happen, but I would always suggest that the gear we tend to use for our bass fishing is capable of landing far bigger fish than our bass - if things go our way of course.

Now I do trust my knots (FG from braid to leader, not sure what my knot to my lure clip on the end of my fluoro is called), and I do check my leader and a few metres of mainline as often as possible, but at the end of the day if you’ve got a bad bit of damage in there that hasn’t been picked up on it could all go snap very suddenly. That’s fishing to me and we do what we can do to load the dice in our favour. It goes without saying now that I only lure fish with barbless hooks, and with such a tight line to a hooked fish when fishing like this I can’t see any issues here. I am fishing with what is labelled as a 20lb braid mainline (20lb/0.165mm/PE#1 Sufix 131), and this is tied to a short length of the not cheap but bloody brilliant 0.33mm/20.9lb Seaguar Yuki Neox Fluorocarbon leader. If I am lucky enough to hook a really good bass on this mark and I happen to be standing in this particular spot when I do, then once again my drag will be wound down tight and I will hook and hold the fish because of all that structure. It may never happen and I may never find out if I can stop a double figure bass dead in its tracks, but you can rest assured that I will do what I can to give myself a chance at finding out what might happen………….

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