When you probably should walk away, but specific little areas look just about fishable and you can’t resist

That storm at the weekend was forecast on that (free) XCWeather app from at least a week out, and whilst none of us would ever trust a weather forecast that far ahead, with the tides and conditions we had for much of last week I wanted to get out as much as possible in case the coastline did end up going to poo. Which it has. Crumbs that was relentless at the weekend, indeed I nearly got blown over and/or washed away when I went for a run early on Saturday morning, so I actually did the sensible thing and waited to run again until before lunch on Sunday when it had calmed down just a fraction!

I am guessing that many of you here look for as much information as you can gather before you head out fishing. I use that Surfline app a lot, and in my favourites are various webcams I will look at to try and get at least a sense of how the sea is looking. I don’t pay for the premium version of the app which means that you have to wait for the infernal adverts to finish before you get to see a live webcam, but think back to the good old days when we didn’t have access to information like this and I’ll take this bit of “inconvenience”. As much as webcams can be invaluable though, they never give you the exact picture and I only use them as a guide.

So we rocked up on one particular day last week and got one hell of a shock! The webcam and swell forecast was giving it lively, but from that live video feed I reckoned it was more than fishable. The number of times I have convinced myself that some webcam is showing lovely green water only for it to be brown and full of weed is too many times to recall for example, but the decent clarity was the least of our problems the other day. The north coast of Cornwall is a different beast to the south coast most of the time, but for whatever technical weather based reasons we found a proper, proper swell rolling in on the south coast.

If I had been on my own or hadn’t caught bass the day before I think I’d have walked away, but we stood and watched for a while - a long way back from some scary surges smashing in I might add - and then came up with a bit of a plan. There was not a hope in hell we could access the first bit of water we would usually target, but if we could time a jump across a gully we could potentially fish some pretty good looking water which was kind of inside the worst of it rolling in if that makes sense. If we had been on a beach we’d have been knackered with such awesome volumes of water rolling in, but because of the makeup of the location we fancied at least a chance at a fish. Various rocks and reefs on specific little sections of the mark looked like they would give us enough accessible water to fish various lures, so we thought what the hell and went for it. The impending weekend’s storm was all over the news by now so I wanted to maximise any fishing chance I could get.

Get me “inside” water rolling in like this and I will often turn to your classic sort of paddletail on a belly-weight weedless hook setup. You know that for me it’s mostly going to be “my” Savage Gear Gravity Stick Paddletail or that lethal Slender Scoop Shad (which I still pat myself on the back about for seeing it on some freshwater related promo stuff from Savage Gear and then asking to see some to try for bass). Give me access to slightly deeper water again on the inside of the worst of it and I do like a hard lure like the IMA Hound 125F Glide or the IMA Sasuke 120 fished a bit slower and with my rod tip up (Cormac and Eric, if you are by any chance reading this, it’s completely down to you two wizards why I would fish a Sasuke 120 so deliberately like this!), but as per this blog post the other day I also need to keep reminding myself how deadly it can be to swim/bump something like the Fiiish Black Minnow or the Savage Gear Savage Minnow Weedless or Sandeel V2 Weedless along the bottom.

When you’re faced with conditions like these which you could have very legitimately walked away from, a single fish means everything to me. For sure we’d love a heap of bass every time we head out, but with how difficult it was firstly to find fishable water and secondly to properly present a lure, if either us caught any bass of any size I was taking the session as a win. We moved and moved to keep trying to find (safely) fishable water and eventually I got nailed on a corner of a set of rocks where I had enough protection from the clean waves rolling in. I was fishing with a very long-casting and very grippy hard lure which I will be able to tell you about next year and which in fact I lost the next day when I dropped the bloody thing, but that aside I was just so pleased that one of us landed a fish from a session which nearly didn’t happen.

My one frustration though is always going to be that I can never truly show you just how awesome the sea was via the medium of still photography. I obviously can’t be out in the waves with my camera around my neck to shoot back at the angler on the shore, and a wide lens from close behind the angler tends to make everything look a bit smaller and less dramatic. Have you ever seen those awesome big wave shots that are shot at Nazaré in Portugal where there are spectators all lined up on a building? Those are some seriously big waves, don’t get me wrong, but they are lent an increased degree of impact through the use of long lenses which by their physical design slightly compress perspective and make it look like the big waves are that much closer to the shore and the spectators. I tend to try and do this sort of thing when conditions get big with our fishing if the location works for it, but you know as well as I do that nothing will ever beat actually being out there and watching serious seas rolling in. Stay safe and don’t push it though, and never at any point did I feel that we were in any danger when we were lure fishing the other day.

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