Lure fishing for Bass

I wasn’t convinced it was worth going fishing today, the wind the past few days has been fairly strong and was still coming from the North East. In the end we decided to go on the toss of a coin, at least the sun was out and neither Tony or I had anything better to do. We arrived at the mark to find dirty water hugging the coast, not what we had hoped for to say the least especially after a 50 minute drive.

Viewing the mark from the cliff top we could see that with a good cast we may be able to reach the clear water, we headed down and out onto the chalk reef and waded as far as we could and managed to get onto a large boulder that served well as a casting platform. After a couple of warm up casts I gave one the beans, firing it high, to catch the wind that was in our favour and landed it just past the boulder you can see in the photo above.

With the lure sitting in the clear water I left it there to settle and then gave it a short retrieve and stopped again this time on the boundary between clear and coloured water, BANG, fish on. OK so this wasn’t a fish that was going to set any records, weighing in just under three pounds, but to know that their’s a few fish about and I had landed my first this spring (excluding the six pounded in Asturias) certainly made me smile. I repeated the same technique and landed another two within a few minutes.

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This was one of those days where a short rod just wasn’t cutting it, Tony was using an 8 foot Teklon and it just didn’t have the backbone to get to the fish, don’t get me wrong it’s a nice enough rod but when you live a fair distance from the sea you just don’t really know the exact conditions you are going to be faced with. That said as you can see in the photo conditions weren’t too bad, it wasn’t a case of trying to cast into a strong onshore wind with rollers crashing in, it’s just sometimes the fish aren’t under your feet and in this case I guess the bass were that far out because they were using the coloured water to their advantage.

Short rods have really been pushed in the market place over the last few years and although a lot of the time distance casting isn’t something you need to worry about when bass fishing I just wonder why limit the amount of water you can explore. If your thinking of taking up lure fishing I’d give serious thought to getting a rod around 9’6″, it’s a good all round rod length for general lure fishing for bass and if your already a keen lure fisherman and like punching out a lure into a big South West blow with the waves crashing in then you may find something a lot longer would help your fishing.

Tony still managed to get hooked into a bass with a cast he really nailed but unfortunately a couple of violent head shakes and she was off. We are both looking forward to getting out again and if we find some clean water and a pleasant SW breeze that will be just fine with us.