When your local bass fishing gets tough, do we actually have much of a clue as to why?

My first cast at about 11pm last night and I got hit on a particular soft plastic sample lure which has been getting me horribly overexcited. The bass didn’t connect but I thought wow, first chuck, we could be in for a good one here, but as Mark and I talked about a couple of hours later when the rewards for our efforts was one small bass to my rod, how many times do you catch a bass or get by a bass on your first chuck and the session doesn’t actually turn out to be a blinder? There’s no getting away from how tough the bass fishing has been around here for a while now, and whilst there are of course plenty of far greater concerns in the wider world right now, if you are reading this then I am guessing you are an angler, and as anglers we surely want to know why……………..

And as Mark and I wandered back in a socially distanced way to our separate cars, we naturally talked about how tough the fishing has been recently. It goes without saying that we both put forth a number of theories and potential reasons and what have you, and what really banged home to me on my drive home was that as human beings who inhabit this glorious earth and spend a certain amount of money on the shiny stuff as we obsessively chase whatever species of fish float our personal boats, when whatever species of fish aren’t doing what we might expect them to do, do we really know why? Mark had said this and I had said that, and at the top of my list was the fact that we have had the most ridiculously glorious spring and for three plus months now we have had essentially calm and clear and offshore weather conditions. My knowledge of bass fishing is not as great as a lot of anglers, but I don’t think it matters if we get a few days or three months plus of crap bass fishing conditions - the bass aren’t coming within casting range for a bit of a laugh. Things need to be right.

It goes without saying that a lot of our saltwater fish species are overfished and numbers sure as hell aren’t what they once were, but when the same time last year or the year before is so completely different to this year so far, are bass stocks in even more trouble or are there are numerous other factors that we are only guessing at? I come back to the spring we have had yet again and how freakily calm this weather has been. How come I keep hearing pretty good bass fishing reports from some anglers I know and trust in south Devon which isn’t many miles from here in south east Cornwall? Endless rumours fly around from boat anglers and so on who say that there are plenty of bass and indeed bait just offshore and so on, but yet again I come back to what do we really know and hearsay is so often exactly that. Surf fishing might have been chucking up some amazing numbers of bass on the north coast of Cornwall last year, but how can you go surf fishing when you go for weeks on end without any decent surf fishing conditions? We can’t make the bass be in the surf if they have no reason themselves to be there.

One thing I keep coming back to my in my head is bait - how much proper knowledge do we have of the various fish and crustaceans and what have you that bass might feed on, indeed do we know exactly what bass do actually feed on and when and where? I started writing a blog post about this the other day in fact but I got myself so tied up in knots with what I think I know and then how much there is that I don’t know squat about that I had to walk away before my brain was completely fried. Around where I live for example, are there any sandeels close inshore that might give the bass a reason to follow them in, and when I think about it, what do I actually know about sandeels and their lifecycle?

There is one unavoidable thing here that also raises its head - am I as an angler guilty of doing the same or similar things when it comes to choosing where I fish on certain tides and times of the year, and is my regularity as such perhaps not building in enough experimentation and flexibility to my own fishing? I could show you a great big reef for example that is not a million miles away from where I live yet which I have yet to walk or explore or fish. Would this reef be any better than reefs I have been fishing? Quite possibly not, but now is surely the time to get out exploring new ground. I live close to a great big estuary system about which on the bass fishing front I know very little about because to be perfectly honest there’s so much water it kinda freaks me out and I can go to different but smaller estuaries which in my head are easier to read. How’s the bass fishing been with you recently and if you are doing particularly well or struggling like we have been recently, what do you put it down to and/or do you actually know why? For sure it’s great to get out there and sometimes beat nature at her own game when the fishing is switched on, but a part of me will always wonder if when the fishing gets tough whether mother nature is getting her own back on us and reminding us human beings that we are so often clutching at straws………………….