Which is better - lots of different marks or a few that you know really well?

Is it a case of getting older but wiser, or is it more a case of taking a long hard look at the areas you tend to fish the most and slightly frying your brain with how little you actually know, and how much more there is to learn? I’m not talking about the actual fishing side of things because I like to think I have always embraced the fact that the fish are always going to beat us up from time to time, rather I am on about where you go fishing and how well you actually know it……………

There is enough going on with bass fishing at the moment that I get to see or hear about to suggest that the start of the season as such is somewhat different to how it was around here last year when we had I think 10+ nights of frost in April. By no means do I have every bass for miles around trying to crawl up my line, but there are a few fish around which then causes those questions to swirl around your head - where do you go fishing? You take a look at the tides and wind and weather and sea state if you can via the webcams, you do a bit of computational logic in your brain, and you come up with a location and a time which via a certain amount of time and experience you feel pretty confident might throw a fish or two up.

Do you ever find yourself wanting to go fishing but you’re slightly stuck on where to go? The other day we were on a size of tide which historically has never worked for me on a specific stretch of coastline around here, and with the calm and clear conditions it felt like it had to be a night fishing session if I was going to fish the open coast. A couple of nights before on a bigger tide and I know exactly where I’d have gone, but I needed a specific state of tide to be in darkness and with these longer and longer days that of course becomes an issue. There’s a lot of coastline around here and I like to think I know a fair bit of it fairly well, but then somebody I know catches a fish or has a good session from a location which screams bass but for whatever reason I have hardly ever fished and it messes with my head! Would you rather have the ability to fish loads of different marks you know okay, or would you rather be fishing a handful of locations only, but you know them inside out?

So we had one of those sort of in between sizes of tide and I wanted to go fishing. I don’t personally subscribe to the bigger tides always producing the best bass fishing, indeed around here I tend to prefer the medium size tides if they combine with decent conditions of course. For some reason though I have tended to do better around the high water at night on the bigger tides, and I don’t pretend to know why. I can guess until my head hurts, so on that particular night last week I could think of a couple of spots to fish but I was itching to try something a bit different because I really enjoy taking a bit of a punt in order to try and learn some more about the waters I call home. We could have played it safe by going somewhere we had fished plenty of times before, or we could fish in the dark at a mark which I am pretty sure we have only ever tried at night once before and nothing happened. We chose the latter because this little bit of coastline has been playing on my mind a lot recently, in that for some reason I am now “seeing” it with a very different set of eyes.

Mark and I headed out when it got dark and I ended up blanking rather nicely myself - but Mark caught a couple of small bass on the white DoLive Stick, and he also got hit a couple more times. Nothing remotely epic then, but those two bass scratched an itch we both had about this place in calm conditions at night, and on the size and state of the tide we had chosen to fish. By no means am I saying that we’d have never gone back if we hadn’t had a sniff of a bass between us the other night, but those two small bass for Mark has now given us that all important jolt of confidence. It’s slightly cheating in that we have both done okay around there during daylight hours when there is a bit of bounce on the sea, but I would suggest that with night fishing you almost need to catch or see fish even more because that element of visualisation is removed from the overall equation and it’s harder to mentally visualise your lure working properly…………….

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