When you’re fishing bouncy conditions and things nearly go wrong - the photos

I wasn’t sure about posting these photos up, but I am going to trust that we can all be grown up here and accept that this fishing thing we all love to do is not without at least some kind of risk. If you have read this blog for a good while you will know that I did a fair bit of fishing safety related work with the RNLI, but at the end of the day the angler makes a decision about where and when they are going to fish. Whether they take extra precautions by utilising some sort of safety gear is also up to them…………

By the way, this is a slideshow. You will need to scroll through to see all the photos which I have placed in a sequence. I can’t imagine it’s going to look that impressive on a phone, but I am used to seeing my imagery on a great big colour corrected computer monitor here in my office.

I love it when I get the chance to make fishing look dramatic and exciting via my photography. I feel that part of that excitement is based around when the sea is on the lively side, but not for one second am I trying to highlight or glamorise riskier saltwater fishing. On the other hand I am also not going to shy away from showing what can go on when I am out fishing with other anglers. By pure chance I had my Sony 70-200 f2.8 camera lens trained on Andy and David here because just before this Andy had landed a nice bass (see Monday’s blog post), and at any point it felt like another fish could come in. I could also see where the two of them chose to stand and fish might lend itself to some dramatic photos. I was set up to shoot at 10 frames per second and I was focus-tracking Andy through the sequence (the guy in the green waterproof jacket).

I wanted to show you these photos because I believe they are exciting and I am proud to have shot them. Please realise that physics comes into play when you are using the longer end of a telephoto lens at a large aperture especially - it’s called foreshortening - and the two anglers in these photos were at no point going to get hit with the full force of those waves. For sure it got pretty hectic, but there are a good few rocks in front of them to break things up a bit, they wanted to stand there because it gave them access to good looking water for the actual fishing, and if something went badly wrong they would have been knocked into a fairly calm and big gully between me and where they were standing. No doubt it would have hurt, but when can there ever be zero risk in life?

Please do not fish for bass like this if you are on your own especially. We are all guilty of pushing it a bit too far at times, but I guess we get right into it and our hearts start to race as the adrenaline courses through us. If I cop a bit of flak for showing these photos then so be it, but fishing is what it is and we have to make our own decisions. Is it “responsible” to photograph something like wing-suiting with how dangerous it is? Life is meant to be exciting. You all have a good weekend…………..