My Recent Catches – A shift in approach…

My Recent Catches – A shift in approach…

If you already own a copy of ‘Bass Lure Fishing – A Guide’s Perspective (Volume 2)‘ and you’ve read as far as Pages 291-294, then the content of this post will resonate – and conclusively so. “The future I reckon mate.” That’s how I described ‘lure fishing for bass with creature baits within estuarine environments‘ in the autumn of 2022 to my friend, Henry Gilbey, as I mapped out the contents of a book that I would subsequently release in the spring of 2023.

A few months on, and a few weeks prior to writing ‘Chapter Four – What The Future Holds…’ during the morning of the first week of January 2023, as I strolled to my chosen ‘estuary-mouth-mark’ with one eye on the margins I ‘sight fished’ a modest winter bass out of a sandy bay that had turned on my 9cm Fox Rage Critter – my first bass hooked and landed by this method incidentally.

Envisaging that certain criteria might or would need to be in place (one of which being that the angler would need to be able to ‘physically see’ their quarry, before diligently casting either into its path or slightly behind it so to garner a reaction) one year to the day, although a number of my theories were ostensibly confirmed by not one, but two captures in the same session, my mind was utterly ‘blown’ by one other potentially ‘critical’ component… Allow me to elaborate…

Mimic

Within the representations and descriptions contained within ‘Chapter Two – An Introduction to Lures’ within my first title ‘The Lure of The Bass‘ I paid particular attention to the shape, size and colour of the prey that bass are routinely hunting. Imitating and/or mimicking ‘small fish’ (gobies, butterfish, sand eels, sprat, etc.) or cephalopods (squid and cuttle) and their movement is what all of my lures are ultimately representing – until now that is……..

Now, something else that I mentioned in the ‘What The Future Holds’ chapter within ‘A Guide’s Perspective (Volume 2)’ is that in my experience, bass hounding fry and immature fish species (be it sea trout, smelt, mullet or even baby bass themselves) high up into the brackish creeks I frequent are actually capitalising on something of a ‘bonus bounty’ here. As what these bass are really up to, and why they are really there, is that they are continually attempting to ‘root out’ and ‘crunch on’ crabs for their breakfast, lunch, dinner, and supper.

Polar-opposite

So picture the scene, as it actually smacks in the face of everything I was taught and told as a teen in regards to catching one of these blisteringly beautiful silver sorcerers. Yep, the complete polar opposite of what I once viewed as the quintessential conditions in which to ‘lure’ a bass:

• It is mid-winter.
• The Sun is dazzling out of a clear-blue sky.
• The tide is a tiny neap.
• The water (that’s around 2.5m deep) is very murky – with perhaps 6-8″ of clarity to it at best.
• I am utilising a weedless a 17g 3″ crab, prawn, crayfish or squat lobster imitation called a Megabass Sleeper Craw.
• I am very, very slowly, yet deliberately ‘trawling’ this lure along the gravelly seabed, with 1/4 turn of the handle at a time, interspersed with short (1-2 second) pauses.

Eye-balled

The area I was fishing, on what I consider to be a momentous day, is a location where I have admittedly spotted more bass than anywhere else in my vast and continually growing portfolio of marks. And with permission granted for me to remain fishing all day, with a couple of lures that were new to me stowed away in my dry bag as I hastily scrambled (alone, and not with Bertie my Border Terrier in tow) two miles along a pretty unforgiving foreshore, I eventually accessed what had been a ‘hot bed’ of activity during the summer and autumn of 2022.

Yes, 2022. Because with that preconceived notion of mine, that what I thought needed to be clear water in which to ‘sight’ the bass I would be targeting (some of which had swam right up to the bladderwrack I was laying on, and yep, I’m nuts) whenever the tides had been ‘perfect’ in my eyes, the wind direction and strength had ruined things, and vice versa throughout 2023. So yes, it really had taken me 16 months to return to the scene of where I’d ‘eye-balled’ two 8lb+ bass nestled up together against a rotting and sunken hull, before watching them circle my offering (a Z-Man TRD CrawZ) a couple of times until they became wary of my foolish haste to keep casting at them…

Maybe I have missed a trick in not at least attempting to cast ‘the creatures’ into certain compact and seemingly bass-rich regions in more turbid water – it has worked elsewhere with brightly-coloured paddle tails and the like as you may well have read. Further, I guess that more coloured-up water provides the angler with an initial, and also a distinct advantage to sneak up on them – the flip side being of course that we cannot always see the bass in this situation…

So, it must be ‘Game Over’ in this respect then…? No! As this, for me, is where things become REALLY interesting, and where a definite shift in my approach and mindset will see me doing things very differently in 2024. Off the back of only one session? Yes, that’s how significant this could be!

Steadfast

I’m certainly not the first angling blogger or writer to state that ‘confidence’ in a method, technique, lure type or venue goes a very long way in fishing. But as a professional guide who is constantly looking for new ways and means to catch these marvellous fish on a lure (and takes great pleasure out of teaching my clients how to do it), when you’ve searched out the entire inner shoreline with all of the proven patterns at your disposal without so much as a sniff, when you then attach something out of the ordinary, and proceed to pull out two bass in the unorthodox predicament described above, it kind of makes you take notice!

I know there are bass lure anglers out there who routinely achieve what I am depicting, and have been doing so for some time. But very much like lure fishing for bass in darkness, sometimes it takes a remarkably steadfast psychology to ‘stick’ with a method until you achieve something by it, rather than just adding it onto the end of a session when, in your, mind you’re already halfway back to the car. And this is what I did on what was a very welcome sunny day after the utter ‘tripe’ we’ve experienced since mid-October – I was determined to extract a bass on the Sleeper Craw!

You see, to have what is undoubtedly a new-found ‘self-assuredness’, that perhaps the bass I landed were there all along, and that they didn’t fancy a lure masquerading as a small fish is something I find fascinating. Moreover, I know of literally dozens of venues where bass will ‘position’ within the bladderwrack or amongst the rocks for long periods in the tide, and yes, more often than not my clients and I will extract one or more of them very early into a session..

But it begs an important question in my mind: Were or are they in fact always situated there on certain stages of the tide, time of year, size of tide, weather conditions, etc. (or least a greater percentage of the time than we have hooked them) but they choose to ignore our offerings because maybe they are preoccupied with what is, 100%, the natural and number one food source within these tidal lagoons – crabs?

Better in the murk?

The hypothesis above also leads me onto something else that has been rattling around my brain… Murky water, when bass are utilising their lateral lines to hunt, head down as they look to snaffle anything on the seabed, within what many (including me) would term as ‘scavenging mode’. Is it possible that when these apex predators decide to turn their attention away from corralling fry, and snapping at prawns, that they become increasingly alert to something scuttling or shuffling along the seabed instead. Could the optimum conditions in which to use ‘The Creatures’ actually be when there is very little clarity…?

Seriously, my brain is hurting here!

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Thanks for reading!

Marc Cowling