Ask my wife and she will tell you that I am very rarely wrong, or to put it another way, I very rarely (if ever) admit when I am wrong! Aren’t most blokes like that though? But with fishing I absolutely love it when I am proven wrong, because that to me means I have got something new to learn, and it’s this continued learning which is such a big part of why I find fishing so endlessly fascinating. Yesterday morning here in south east Cornwall was a classic example………….

Mark and I came to the same conclusion on where to fish early on Sunday morning, but on the long walk down I’d have liked to see a bit more bounce on the sea than what we were seeing. No way says Mark, I’ll take exactly these conditions at this time of year thank you very much. Ummmmm thinks me. So we start fishing, but in no time Mark’s had enough of the weed and he moves a few hundred yards away to see if it’s any better. We are carrying radios to keep in touch which is ideal for a situation like this. I am fishing away and not doing too badly with the weed, but in all honesty I am not feeling a huge amount of love about the conditions combined with the low tide and lack of movement. The place just feels dead to me.

But not to Mark. The tide’s flooding now and we speak on the radio to find out what’s happening in our respective locations. Squat. OK, so it’s well into January, but with the so called winter we’ve been having down here we are in with more than a shout at bass - yet I can’t help feeling that the decision we came to on where to fish is feeling potentially like a duff call. I’m a positive person by nature but for whatever reason I’m just not feeling the love where I am chucking lures and that’s not really like me.

I make another radio call to Mark to see how he’s getting on. Squat, although he does tell me that he likes where he currently is as soon as a certain rock starts to cover on the pushing tide. Ummmm I think. OK, so the tide’s on the way in and things are starting to fizz up just that little bit, but I can’t shake the feeling that I should be fishing somewhere else, or at least where I am currently fishing ain’t cutting it at all. Time to head down towards Mark.

Which I start to do when the radio suddenly crackled into life - Mark’s landed a bass on his beloved Feed Shallow (he’s frigging lethal with it), and it sounds like a half-tidy fish. I ask him over the radio to put it in a rockpool so that I can photograph it when I reach him. I give him nudging 5lbs for the fish and it’s in about as prime condition as you could ever hope to see a bass. Outfriggingstanding, so damn good to see, and what a jolt of confidence.
OK, so no other bass were landed and I missed a hard bang on a DoLive Stick a bit further up the tide, but way above that for me is the fact that I was proven wrong with my doubts about the conditions, and it means that I learnt a valuable lesson about where we were fishing that I am sure will reap rewards at some point in the future in the form of a few bass. Mark was right and I was wrong, and I ain’t remotely ashamed to admit it……...

Sometimes the best things do cost that bit more, and whilst there may well be loads of options to the OSP DoLive Stick, so far I haven’t come across a “twitchbait” style of soft plastic that I prefer. Horses for courses and all that, but I like the lure, it works very well for me, and until something better (for me) comes along then I’ll stick with them - but they ain’t exactly cheap as chips, and sometimes they can be a swine to get hold of. I’ve been paying roughly £11 for a pack of six 6’’ DoLive Sticks, keep an eye on here and here if that helps. Call me tight if you like, but I have come up with a few simple ways that are geared towards getting as much life as I can out of these lures……….

5/0 Lunker City Texposer hook

I am more than happy to stick the outstanding Lunker City Texposer weedless hooks in the white senkos that I tend to fish with at night, but then the Wave Fishing 5’’ Bamboo Sticks are made from what seems to be a relatively tough sort of soft plastic that doesn’t tear up that easily - whereas the DoLive Sticks rigged on the same hooks don’t last nearly as well. They seem to be made from a softer kind of soft plastic, and because of this I do like to use one of those hitchhiker style weedless hooks with them. At not far off £2 a lure, I’d kinda like to get a decent bit of use out of them, and whilst yes, of course they don’t cost anywhere near as much as a decent hard lure, bass can and do sometimes rip a DoLive Stick clean off the hook.

6/0 Mustad Wide Gape hook

The two hitchhiker style weedless hooks that I have most experience with are from Mustad and Owner. The Mustad Wide Gape hook in 5/0 or 6/0 works great in the 6’’ long OSP DoLive Sticks, and I like how these hooks aren’t very expensive at all. I have never, ever had a single issue with those Mustad hooks and the sort of fish we are catching from our shorelines, but if you tied me down and allowed me to use only one style of weedless hook with the DoLive Sticks then it would be the more expensive Owner Twistlock, code 5167, the ones that have a yellow sticker on them that says “Designed by Gary Yamamoto”. The size 5/0 and 6/0 just fit the 6’’ DoLive Sticks absolutely perfectly, and I do think that the little centering pin on Owner’s version of the hitchhiker (Owner Twistlock) makes for ever so slightly easier rigging than the regular hitchhiker screw thing that is on those Mustad hooks.

6/0 Owner Twistlock hook, code 5167, "Designed by Gary Yamamoto"

Bear in mind we’re talking about small margins here, and both hooks/systems work perfectly with these lures. I just slightly prefer the way the Owner hook sits with this particular lure. Both hooks last ok as regards rusting up, but they don’t last like the amazingly rustproof Lunker City Texposer ones do. In reality this doesn’t really matter much when you think of the amount of use you can get from a hook that you will very rarely snag up and lose anyway.

Then what I do when I’m fishing with these soft plastics is to keep an eye on them - if they start tearing up due to catching fish or repeated casting, I’ll take it off, put a new or previously repaired lure on, and keep that damaged DoLive Stick in my lure box for repairing when I get home. If they are going to tear up, it’ll be around where the hitchhiker secures in the front of the lure, or around where the hook comes up and through the body of the lure. You could of course keep fishing with the lure and not take any notice of them starting to tear up, but I have found that I can prolong their life a lot by not letting them get too damaged before replacing them.

And when I say repairing, I mean doing a bit of simple surgery with the “never be without” Mend-It soft plastic repair glue - paint around, in and over the holes with Mend-It, let the lures dry, and take them out fishing again, almost as good as new. If you fish with soft plastics that you pay decent money for and don’t have any Mend-It soft plastic repair glue then you owe it to yourself to get some. Anyway, yes, I am obsessed all over again with the OSP DoLive Stick, and yes, trying to prolong their life might be considered a little besotted, but I couldn’t give a stuff! Hope it might help a bit……...

If there is one thing I absolutely cannot wait to do this year, it’s to get back over to Kerry in SW Ireland and do some more of this co-guiding work I do with John Quinlan of the rather excellent Thatch Cottage Ireland setup. I know it’s work and some people don’t like their work at all, but I do, and I can’t help it - I love this stuff. Working with John and helping anglers catch a few fish, learn a bit about lure fishing, and quite simply have a good holiday is such a buzz………

And we have got a few places available this July. I like that time of year in Kerry because you’ve got a good chance at everything - bass of course, and this is the species we spend the most time chasing, but you’ve also got what can be some ridiculously good pollack fishing from shore and boat, sight fishing to mullet if the conditions are right, and salmon on the river if we get the right water levels, etc. These trips are not about heaps of monster bass crawling up the line, rather it’s the whole experience of fishing hard in a special place, hopefully learning a bit, having a hell of a giggle, eating plenty of good food, and catching a bunch of fish on lure gear with other likeminded anglers. If the idea of this floats your boat then please contact me and we can get things moving. There’s plenty more info and contact details on the Guiding page at the top as well.

The two July trips we are running this year are as follows:

Trip 1

Tuesday 4th July - arrive at Thatch Cottage

Fishing - Weds 5th, Thurs 6th, Friday 7th, Sat 8th

Sun 9th July - depart

Trip 2

Sunday 9th July - arrive at Thatch Cottage

Fishing - Mon 10th, Tues 11th, Weds 12th, Thurs 13th

Friday 14th July - depart

In this section I’d like to look more at choices, the way too many choices hamper your fishing, the way that simple looking fishing might fly in the face of ‘knowledge’ and the reasons why we might do something, buy a certain reel, rod, line or lure.

Should you use a reel of size 2500, 3000, a 4000, something else? Who cares, use what you know and like ...

However... Know your reel.

Most certainly do not or perhaps, a kinder way is to suggest they do not consider reel size outside of potential balance, weight and line capacity.

Retrieve ratio, line per turn all matter but, only in like for like comparisons with other reels and your mates.

Reels are, like I said, important but not to the point where you need to play both the brand name and money game in competition with your peers. Instead, just find a suitable one and stick with it.

Fishing needle’s is simple, easy, a no brainer. Most needlefish skills involve learning to leave the lure alone, trusting in it and having tackle that doesn’t interfere with it in that context. As regards reels and line, especially at night and throwing lightweight soft needlefish, nothing kills a session faster than a braid knot.

How easy is it, to simply cast and retrieve a lure, or cast and swing?

OK, go and find a fly fisherman's guide to presenting a dry fly. Why is presenting a needlefish any different? Well, it isn’t. You can go on a river and strip a lure back just like you might on a stocked small still water. However...

Go and watch the specialists, the dry fly men, the wet fly men, the salmon men who are still fly fishing yet, it’s all not always so subtlety different. Go and read some stuff on night time sea trout fishing for example and you’ll start to see a picture building. In fact, one book I always recommend to any potential night lure angler around currents and flows is ‘Sea Trout Fishing’ by Hugh Falkus.

Look at how a river coarse angler is asking the float to deliver a small bait in-line with the flow of the river or a stillwater waggler setup delivers a bait hopefully falling at the same rate as free offerings. This float fishing also works with lures, in rivers regards float jigging for the mighty steelhead and yes, even hanging a plastic crab or a shrimp under a float for wrasse, maybe even redfish in the Carolina’s USA.

Many top anglers from these branches of the sport have developed methods and skills aimed at reducing drag, getting baits to move in-line with currents and flows and they recognise, some area’s in any given water course are ‘better’ for X, Y, or Z reasons.

Sea lure anglers seem oblivious to much of this and many don’t even realise, or care to learn that the seas actually flow, and tide doesn’t come IN and go OUT, they know nothing of the rule of 12th’s, how water temperature affects lures and lines, how land affects winds, how waves move, how features and which features determine how bass or target species behave so ask yourself, WHY would such a person care, even remotely, about how and why a lure, representing x,y,or z bait, behave in a,b, or c water?

Turn your reels handle ONCE and how much line gets moved? Do you know? If not, why not. Do you realise that in a cross wind AND current, a lure may be acting like a car driving the wrong way up or down the motorway, do you know, that in faster flows, bass generally run deeper.

In the case of the latter, yes, it’s a fact, bass might indeed be deeper in strong flows because the water at the bottom moves slower. You have to THINK. I believe everyone has the ability to process data like this at incredible rates. Look, I don’t carry a science book around with me, you just do stuff, like I do stuff but my stuff is clearly influenced by what knowledge I carry inside. Imagine I am fishing a gutter running left to right. To the right is west. There is a strong F5 westerly blowing and this gully is say, 10ft deep along it’s centre. It’s flowing at 3mph. The bottom is rough and strewn with mixed sized boulders.

I’ll guarantee, there will be at least 3 layers of water speeds. The surface 2ft might be moving 20% faster, if not more. The middle depths might stabilise before friction slows the lower foot or so. In the case of some boulders, they might create layered eddy currents in which water may in fact, for a period, be flowing (from your perspective), backwards or the ‘wrong way’. Not the wrong way of course because it’s completely natural but your lure, simply retrieved, will of course, not take ANY of these flow nuances into consideration.

Lures with bibs are of course, affected more. Soft lures with a paddle tail are also, affected, far more than a simple, symmetrical lure like a needlefish. In the case of tails and water/retrieve speed, you can almost shake the tail off if you retrieve such a lure too fast, or against currents. In the further case of a bibbed, plastic style minnow lure, there is a point at which the lure becomes useless and ‘rolls out’. Literally, it gives up, rolls on it’s side and comes back skipping the surface with all the grace of a wet carrier bag. Not good you might say. Consider the ratio of involvement regards speed : lure type: sink rate: water depth: temp : etc.

Your reel might say, retrieve 80cm of line, per turn of the handle. Someone else’s, 90cm, another, 105cm. You might have 20lb braid, your friend 15lb and someone else, something different. The point is though, turning that handle at 1 turn per second, it’s rare you’ll exceed a lure speed that would challenge a brisk walking pace. YET...

Paddle tail lures kick like mules and many minnow style lures ‘will’ roll out as described. And this is in normal waters. You add moving water and stuff simply stops working as you may imagine. Needlefish and lures without extravagant actions and intention, are in many ways, immune to overwork unless YOU apply it. If you know how to swing the lure, where to cast into strong flows and how to maintain contact, the needefish will look natural in water conditions where many other lure types are simply the clown at the party. They stand out, too much.

Know your colours... or NOT

Imagine now, in the midst of trying to fathom a million ways to present a lure in as natural a way as possible, you start adding 25 colour variations and 3 size variations into the mix. You could forget it and learn from the dry fly angler who instead, chooses to match the hatch or offer something that ‘looks and behaves’ in a natural manner and concentrate instead upon presentation. You could choose to restrain yourself and have reasons, any reasons for using X or Y coloured lure or, like me, you could simply use whatever takes your fancy at the time as long as previously considered criteria like size, contrast, weight, action and profile are met first.

In fact, to prove a point rather than guessing, I threw together a small yet functional python3 script to work out a much smaller set of possible combo's using just 2 needefish types, 6 colours, 4 lengths, 4 weights and 5 sink rates. I cannot print here the results as in just that amount of choice,

you are left with 15360 permutations. Crazy right? It's incredulous to imagine 15360 permutations of lure before you even start fishing and then of course, you still need to be on fish.

You see, I’m not trying to be smart here but I myself would NEVER confuse the issue with such an amount of permutations. Just keep stuff simple and as I have written and proven elsewhere, colours in the main mean little to the fish, more to the anglers and more still to those selling lures to the anglers. At night, most mid range saturations of colours resolve to the same grey shade so as far as the fish are concerned, mid green, mid pink, mid blue, mid anything really will desaturate to 'almost' the same mid grey shade as 'green', so, if we need a representation of all of those mid colours, green is it. Add contrast into the affray and why not simply carry white/yellow for 'light', green for mid and maybe a dark blue/purple or black for high contrast? How much simpler that is BUT, it still leaves 3 colours or contrasts and 7680 possible permutations. Still clearly no good.

This is why when we go needlefishing, at night, (soft or hard), we choose the BEST POSSIBLE choice. For me, and for the people I generally fish with, that seems to be, in the waters we fish, 'GREEN', '1oz', ' 6" ', 'Centre Weighted' and go from there. If this was now daylight I might change green to white, I might not. If this was a dark new moon, overcast, I might change that to black. If I needed to cast miles I might choose a tail weighted 1oz before I chose to up the weight. So there is, and has to be logical choice made from a selection of lures you may need. Just carry the lures that sit within the boundary parameters of the water you are likely to fish. Done!

To be continued.........

I absolutely love talking to knowledgeable people who are also passionate about their subjects, and whilst to non-anglers the whole subject of waders and wader related issues may not be of any interest at all, I could cheerfully talk to Dave Gordon of DiverDave’s Wader repair all day long. Holy cow the guy knows his stuff, and whilst I haven’t actually met Dave yet, we have talked a few times now, including yesterday, and every time I come away with yet more understanding of all things waders and a hope that one day we will get to meet up and say hi.

Lots of people know plenty of stuff, but if there is one thing that turns me right off somebody is if they are then overbearing and/or tedious with that knowledge. Talk with Dave on the phone and you can’t help but be infected with his enthusiasm and understanding of the whole world of waders - and yes, I know that might sound a bit odd when waders are not exactly the most exciting things in the world, but that’s the whole point here. People who are knowledgeable, passionate, AND can then bring that subject to life. I don’t want to embarrass the bloke, but he is genuinely fascinating to talk to on the phone.

I’ve got some Simms waders to send up to Dave because the bloody things keep on springing a leak somewhere new and the alcohol rubbing spray technique that I use isn’t stopping water getting in anymore. I am also mightily interested in what Dave calls “Warranty Replacement” waders - my understanding is that they get various new or very nearly new waders in that they then do their wader testing and repair thing to and then offer them for sale at some really good prices. I believe the best way to go about getting some of these waders is either to contact the guys here, or keep an eye on their Facebook page which is at “Dave Gordon (Diverdaves wader repair)”. Dave is very kindly sending me a bottle of his “Repel” waterproof spray to see how it might work for me (check here), and from how he was describing the stuff, it sounds like it might be really useful for our fishing jackets and waders. I will report back. OK, so if I was running this blog from the Seychelles we would never be talking about waders, but I don’t, and we are……….

Let’s forget about the price for a second here and I’ll tell you what I think of Daiwa’s brand new 12 strand braid after a good amount of time fishing with it - this is one serious line that hasn’t given me even a murmur of a problem whilst I’ve been using it. This Daiwa Morethan 12 Braid casts like the proverbial dream, it’s very, very thin - to the point that I have cut my fingers several times when pulling line off my spinning reel to set my drag - it knots well, it fishes great, I love the bright green colour, and it feels more like a solid kind of mainline rather than a woven braid if that makes any sense. I can only find the one thing about this very special braid that I don’t really like………………….

That price of course. Now I’m not saying that a 12-strand braid like this is not worth the money, because it’s obviously a lot of technology wrapped up in a mainline that I am sure will in time filter down to cheaper braids, but yet again I must come back to 2016 and the very much sub-£20 8-strand braids that became available, and how the three that I have fished with so far have changed how much I am prepared to spend on a braid mainline for my lure fishing these days. Why? Because however good this new Daiwa Morethan 12 Braid is - and it’s very, very good - when I am out fishing I can’t actually find a meaningful difference between this braid and those other, somewhat cheaper ones. Better anglers I am sure can wax lyrical about the differences that I myself can’t find, but I’m only being honest here.

The problem I suppose is that the law of diminishing returns is coming into play here. You’ve got what I believe is some pretty new braid technology producing a mainline that is simply sublime to fish with, yet at the same time you’ve got something like Daiwa’s own, much cheaper J-Braid being sublime to fish with as well. Sure, I can fish with this roughly £50 spool of braid and convince myself over time that I am seeing benefits over the cheaper lines, but in reality I am not. Daiwa quotes this about this new 12-strand braid: “Developing the world’s first 12 ply braid and applying Daiwa’s UVF (Ultra Volume Fibre) and +Si Evo Silicone we have produced the ultimate high-density braid exhibiting supreme abrasion resistance and ultimate strength. With 72% improved abrasion resistance, 20% more strength, an 18% more slippery surface and 30% less line stretch compared to other 8 braid premium PE lines, our 12 braid is the ultimate in line technology. By reducing the diameter and creating an ultra smooth surface this allows 12 braid to produce less friction/resistance on the guides and spool rim allowing for longer smoother casting, less noise, minimal water penetration and incredible sensitivity. You will feel more connected to your rod and reel.” Sounds great if you ask me, but to be honest it makes feel even more inadequate that I am not massively aware of all these incredible gains (if indeed they really are anyway?) when I am out fishing with the line!

The simple fact is that some anglers will buy the most expensive tackle because they can and they want to, and who I am to say this is wrong? Sure as hell around £50 is a lot of dosh to spend on a 135m spool of mainline, but I drive a Berlingo (epic!) and working in fishing ain’t exactly going to make me rich, so what constitutes cheap and expensive is different for all of us. Daiwa UK were kind enough to supply me with a spool of this Morethan 12 Braid to play with, and I’ve been fishing with the 22lb/PE#1/0.12mm, but would I go out and buy this line with my own money? As I said earlier, I am sure that over time a braid like this will drop in price as something even newer comes along, but for the moment I am more than happy sticking with the sub-£20 8-strands whilst enjoying the fact that I have been lucky enough to fish with a high-end mainline like this very impressive Daiwa Morethan 12 Braid. A glimpse of the future of braid mainlines?

There’s a high chance that what you see in this short video ain’t nothing remotely new to you, but I make no apologies for that - because in truth I remain convinced that a lot of anglers getting into lure fishing for bass especially are confused as hell about how to go about fishing with soft plastics such as the DoLive Stick. By no means do I mean to say via this video that this is THE way to fish with a lure like this, rather it’s one simple but pretty damn effective way to do it, and it’s how I have been fishing with this lure and catching bass……….

And it’s also an exercise on my part at shooting a bit of video with a specific goal in mind, and then trying to cut that footage together in a way that flows well and also shows what I am trying to get across in an easy to understand way. Sounds simple if you know all about this sort of stuff, but I don’t, and I am trying to teach myself a bit of it and see where it goes. I also got the GoPro out to try a bit of showing the DoLive Stick underwater as we work it, and it’s a big thanks to Mark for helping me out with it all. We also lucked out the other morning because it was absolutely stunning, and whilst this doesn’t actually help with showing how we’re fishing with these lures, I am a sucker for a decent drop of light as you know. I can’t help seeing the world of fishing as a stills photographer, but I am enjoying a bit of messing around with video on this new Fuji X-T2 mirrorless camera I’ve been shooting for a while now.

OK, so the video is based around the OSP DoLive Stick, but I’d fish other “twitchbait” style soft plastics such as the MegaBass Cattle Tongue, MegaBass DOT Crawler and even a senko like this. I don’t have a lifetime of experience at fishing for bass with lures, but neither do many of us who have fallen so hard for this style of fishing, and at least this simple video is a visual demonstration of something that I reckon a bunch of anglers could have a go at and benefit from.

Steve with a 9lb bass taken on a slowly straight-retrieved senko during the day

Quite aside from this “working” such lures around though, I have also seen a lot of big bass caught over in Ireland especially by doing nothing more than winding a senko in at say a quarter of the speed at which we might retrieve the same lure at night, as per the video below. And yes, I know it’s meant to be that you wind lures slower at night than you do in the day, but with the fish I have seen caught and also caught myself, I would suggest that there are many different ways to skin the proverbial cat……………..

I am lucky to get the chance to mess around with a bunch of different lures rods, and whilst there does seem to be an amazing array of good lure fishing gear out there these days, it’s only natural that a few items really, really float my boat in a major way. I’ll tell you what I most enjoy about this 9’ 10-30g Major Craft Truzer that I have here - leaving it be, trying other lure rods out for a while, and then coming back to it and realising all over again how frigging perfect this rod is for me and my lure fishing for bass. If you read this blog I am sure you have noticed how many lure rods I get to play around with, but for all the gear I am lucky enough to try out, I haven’t found a 9’ long lure rod that I like as much as this near as dammit perfect (for me) Major Craft Truzer……..

OK, so I’ve heard a bunch of anglers complaining about their Truzers breaking on them, and whilst I can’t help but wonder if at least some of it is angler error and either not realising so or simply not admitting to it, I do also wonder if somewhere along the line there was a genuine problem with some of them. I have never heard anything from Major Craft to say there had been a dodgy batch of rods or anything like that, but nothing untoward has ever happened to me with any of the Truzer family of rods that I have fished with, so I am not about to damn a rod based on stuff I hear versus the rod I actually have here continuing to perform so perfectly for me.

I reviewed this 9’ Truzer in September 2014 (check here), and whilst as I said earlier I try out numerous different rods and therefore have not been fishing exclusively with it, it’s had one hell of a lot of fishing time with me over the last couple of years - and without a doubt I like the thing even more than when I wrote that review. Putting out a 6’’ OSP DoLive Stick on this 9’ Truzer is just awesome. I just feel so well connected to the lure if that makes sense, and because the rod is so incredibly steely, when a bass hits it feels like a glorious jolt of electricity right down my arm. I can still miss the frigging fish though, as indeed I did the other day!

I am more than comfortable fishing a decent 9’6’’ lure rod these days, but if you tied me down and allowed me to use the one length of lure rod for my bass fishing, I reckon I’d settle for 9’ long. Why? Partly because this 9’ Truzer is so damn good, and partly because I slightly prefer working various soft plastics especially on the slightly shorter rod. Does it matter? Not really when a rod like the sub-£200 Major Craft Skyroad Surf 9’6’’ is so ridiculously good, as indeed is the more expensive HTO Shore Game 9’6’’, but then I pick the 9’ Truzer up again, clip on say a DoLive Stick or IMA Salt Skimmer, and I can’t help but feel the love all over again.

This rod is every single thing I want from a regular casting weight bass lure fishing rod. It’s so incredibly steely and fast and responsive - which I like very much, but of course you may not - and I just love lure fishing with it. I can lengthen my drop a bit, slow down a touch, and put a Patchinko out a country mile if needs be, but for all the different hard and soft lures I have fished with on this 9’ Truzer, nothing gives me that feeling of connection as deftly (what, me?) fishing a soft plastic like the OSP DoLive Stick, or bumping a Black Minnow around in a bit of current or surf. If a lure rod is meant to transmit as much information to you as possible, I would suggest that no other 9’ lure rod I have fished with has ever done that job to a higher level than this sublime Major Craft Truzer 9’ 10-30g. In time a 9’ lure rod must surely come along that I will end up liking more than this thing, but wow is it going to have to be one hell of a bit of carbon to knock the Truzer off top spot………..

If like me you happily accept that we will never come close to knowing it all as regards nature and the fish we chase, do you still ask yourself a whole heap of questions and try to come up with a logical answer anyway? Granted, said answer may well be way off the mark, but it can be fun to look for a reason as such, and recent happenings around here in south east Cornwall have got the old grey cells a churning…………

Whilst this winter is another classic example of never knowing what you’re going to get weather wise and of course we have no choice but to take what is thrown at us, I really, really look forward to November and December around here for bass fishing. Some years we have hardly been able to get near the sea for the conditions, but with the so called winter we have been having down here we had a lot of what I would call pretty damn good bass fishing conditions around here in that say eight week run up to Xmas - ok, so the fishing was not bad at times, but to be honest it wasn’t nearly as good as the conditions we were getting suggested it might be.

We caught a bunch of fish away from the south east of our rather wonderful county, but I’d have expected to see more bass with the time we put in close to home. There could of course be a whole heap of reasons for this - with overfishing of course being at the top of any list - but with what was going on around here, I can’t help but wonder if for a lengthy period there was that much food around not very far offshore that the bass would have been expending unnecessary energy by coming inshore to look for food. Surely predatory fish go to where the easiest and most plentiful food source is?

I would suggest that while it could be a giggle to hook a fish like this from the shore on your bass fishing tackle, I would also suggest that it would be a mighty fine way to try a new spool of braid out, 'cos this beauty's taking the lot!

As much as bluefin tuna are one of the most impressive fish I have ever been lucky enough to see and indeed catch in my lifetime, I refuse to believe that they were stationed off our coastline for a bit of a laugh. If there is one thing that spending a lot of time with John Quinlan over in Kerry has taught me, it’s that I am guilty of not thinking enough about searching for the food that bass want to eat when I am out chasing bass - and with there being a load of bluefin tuna hanging around here, I must assume that there was a hell of a lot of food for them, indeed surely that was the sole reason that those magnificent fish were here?

So if it’s something like serious numbers of herring that the tuna were hanging around to stuff their colourful faces on, does it make sense that most self-respecting bass would also be joining in on the feeding frenzy and not then wasting energy to come close inshore and be so kind as to crawl up our lines as they can sometimes do around the end of the year? Or is my attempt at applying some sort of logical thought here merely my ineptitude as a human being and not understanding something else that was going on?

If our local coastline had been blown to pieces by winter storms then we’d have never been able to notice how things didn’t seem quite “normal”, but when you get good conditions you can’t help but think about previous years when you got similar conditions. I remember a trip I did to the south coast of Ireland a few years ago now in October when we were getting report after report about how many herring I think it was that the boats we could see just offshore were landing, and with some pretty tidy conditions in fact we struggled like crazy to catch bass. OK, so with what I know now I wonder if we did some different things (white senkos at night for a start) whether we’d have caught more fish, but that week or so has always stuck in my head as being a potentially classic example of there being that much easy food around for the bass that it actually impacts negatively on our fishing.

And the pre-Xmas period we have just had is now another example that sits in my head as a couple of months that I can’t explain. We hammered a heap of bass up on the north coast but might then nip out locally in some conditions that you’d be literally running down the cliffs to get a lure in the water, yet come away with things just not firing like you’d expect. For sure there might have been a hundred different factors impacting upon all this, but I don’t remember hearing about all those bluefin tuna being around like that before, and my brain can’t help but wonder at these potential coincidences. Who really knows, but then yet again isn’t that the whole crux of this fishing thing that we so love?

Thanks again to Keith for these guest blog posts, wow has this stuff got me thinking about things for 2017! I am off to France later today to spend some time with the Fiiish people so I’m not sure if I will be able to get any more blog posts up this week. Take it away Keith……..

“Following on from the last part ... Open your minds young padawans.

If you are going to make your own or get a custom builder to make you some, please consider all the facts laid out beforehand in this article. Don’t just guess, think about it and then, choose the BEST POSSIBLE MATCH.

It might be, slow sinking, 6”, tail weighted, 1.25oz, white. It might be you need 2 or 3 types to start and you might indeed, not know at all. In the latter case, a slow sink 6” green needle, centre weighted cannot fail to catch if fished correctly. Buy or make 3. One to use, one to lose and one to start your friend off. The more of you actually fishing these styles and comparing data, catches etc the more you will learn about what you need, when, where and how they should behave. It’s not rocket science.

When I go to sinking styles, like DEEP runs and gullies I might want a needlefish but I’ll probably run a bucktail through first. I’ll match the length by simply adding a trailer of pork or similar. Much cheaper and yet, just as effective, fished in many ways much like a needlefish and yet, also not so much in that they SINK and, no matter how much you read the quote...“Float the bucktail through the run”, bucktails, ‘lead cast’ bucktails do NOT ******* float... LOL

What was meant by that statement that still persists in books and on the internet is the balance between the weight, the sink rate, the retrieve speed of the reel , elevation of the rods tip and the waters depth and speed. In a side sweep, you can, with practice, just retrieve at a steady pace and just about maintain a depth for some period as it does so. The same is true of a straight retrieve to some degree.

The thing to start taking from all of this is, many of these swing, drift, and trot styles are LINKED. What is learned in one, is often applicable in another. Sometimes not but generally yes, it’s true.

This being in unison with the water medium isn’t by itself, any better, or worse than simply casting at retrieving a lure on standard tackle in the standard way. Well, by itself it isn’t. Where it really starts to pay off is around marks where water conditions affect the way bait holds and swims and of course, at night, bait behaves in a much more benign way.

Bass know both what these baitfish look like and, how they behave in such water. What would happen in you saw a car driving the wrong way up the motorway? Is that normal? No, it would likely distress you or damn well should anyway…

So why then, can’t we try to ensure our lures blend in that bit better? Of course we can by trying to present such lures in the ways we have already described above.

On a more, just in touch swing, or a true drift, a properly designed needlefish, or rigged senko etc will align MUCH faster with the right ‘line control’. You will get all the little swings and nuanced side to side movements and a more stable drift depth wise too because as we discussed previously, an over tight line creates DRAG!

Now take this idea and apply it.

Wave faces travel UP, longshore drifts are more lateral. Rip heads often cycle and have both outgoing conduits and incoming ones either side. Yet the vast majority of people casting into surf cast straight out, and retrieve straight back in ?

White water from swell sucks and surges, lapping the shoreline and creating all sorts of complex currents below. Things sink faster in white water too remember as it’s full of air. Yet people seem insistent on fighting nature with their lures."

I’ve been waiting for these SOS guys to publish their “Sea Bass Fishery Update”, and I make no apologies for publishing it in full here on my blog - whilst I would implore you to take a close look here at SOS’s (Save Our Sea Bass) summary of the actual regulations that have come into force, because at the end of the day that is what their reaction below is based on, in truth you’ll get a great overview below as I shamelessly copy and paste their quite excellent summarisation. Nope, nothing’s ever perfect when you mix nature, politics and entirely too many people on this glorious planet, but if you ask me then what has come into being as regards bass stocks is surely a shining example that the noise which anglers are increasingly starting to make is actually making a difference. Please read on and draw your own conclusions, but it remains for me to say a profound thank you to those kind people who give up their time to try and improve our corner as such…………

“Sea Bass Fishery Update – 31 January 2017

Hear Us Roar!

2016 will be remembered in fishing circles as the year recreational anglers found their voice and united with determination to defend bass stocks and recreational bass angling. Anglers, guides, tackle shops, tackle suppliers, and the angling press and media – all coming together to demand a sustainable bass fishery and a fair deal for recreational anglers.

Our sincerest thanks to the many thousands of you who supported the numerous campaigns: the petition in early 2015 against gill nets; the House of Commons debate on bass; the march on George Eustice’s constituency office in Camborne; the lobbying of the EU Commission as they prepared their proposal for 2017 Fishing Opportunities; the lobbying of George Eustice and other Fisheries Ministers in advance of the 2017 Fishing Opportunities meeting, and finally the Government website petition in November to “Get the Nets Out!”

Grubby Politics

At the Fishing Opportunities meeting in Brussels in December, it was agreed by EU Fisheries Ministers that only commercial hook & liners and recreational anglers would be able to target bass. But the UK and Welsh Governments’ attitude to this agreement was disappointing: they put out statements that contradicted this. Defra said they interpreted the agreed text to provide an “allowance” of 250kg per month for fixed netters that included, but was not restricted to, by-catch. In other words, Defra maintained that fixed netters would have a vessel catch limit of 250kg per month and would be able to target bass in 2017.

In response, the EU Commission promptly issued a new draft of the legislation making it crystal clear that it would be illegal for fixed netters to target bass and that the fixed netters’ 250kg per month allowance was only for “unavoidable by-catches”. The UK Government has just corrected its statement on its petition site to match the new law.

The New Rules

On 29 January 2017, the new EU laws for the Northern bass fishery in 2017 came into force. You can view them here.

In short:

• the rules for recreational anglers have been rolled-over unchanged from 2016: C&R in the first 6 months of 2017 and a 1 fish bag limit in the last 6 months of 2017.
• commercial hook & liners can land 10 tonnes of bass in 2017 but have a closure in February and March.
• fixed netters cannot target bass, but have a 250kg per month allowance for unavoidable by-catch.
• Demersal trawlers and seiners cannot target bass, but have an unavoidable by-catch allowance of 3% of catch with an overall cap of 400kg per month.
• drift netters and pair trawlers cannot target bass and have no by-catch allowance.
• Commercial fishing for bass from the shore is illegal and there is no by-catch allowance.

So, what do Save Our Sea Bass think of these new rules?

Impact on the Bass Stock

In June 2016, ICES advised that the bass stock is now below Blim. This means the stock has fallen to such a low level that there is a high probability that the stock’s ability to regenerate itself will be impaired due to insufficient egg production and the stock may fail to recover as expected and remains depleted for extended periods. Accordingly, ICES recommended a zero catch for 2017 to get the stock back to a safe level as quickly as possible.

The EU Fisheries Ministers talk a good game about respecting the science, but seem congenitally unable to follow the scientific advice in full. Recognising this, the EU Commission’s Fishing Opportunities proposal was not for a zero catch, but for 1,000 tonnes of landings, which would increase the stock by 8% (a zero catch would have given a 22% increase).

However, because the EU Fisheries Ministers have allowed “unavoidable by-catch” allowances, which will be difficult or impossible to enforce, it seems likely that landings will be far in excess of the 1,000 tonnes, so the stock will decline again in 2017, meaning tighter restrictions next year.

Impact on Fixed Netters

It will be illegal for fixed netters to fish for bass in 2017, a vitally important step in moving to a sustainable fishery and a fantastic victory for everyone who joined our campaign.

However, the UK and Welsh Governments’ statements after the Fishing Opportunities meeting made it clear that they still support fixed netters being able to target bass, despite their unsustainability. A political fudge has been delivered: fixed netters cannot legally target bass, but instead of being given a “percentage of catch” restriction that would make enforcement easy and ensure that they cannot target bass, they have been given a monthly unavoidable by-catch allowance that is far more than they need for genuine unavoidable bycatch and ensures that it will be extremely difficult to stop fixed netters who illegally target bass.

We await an explanation from the Marine Management Organisation of how it intends to enforce the new law for fixed netters, but to be frank we do not have high hopes – it has been given a virtually impossible job. We will continue to press for a complete ban on fixed netters landing bass.

Impact on Hook & Liners

We are disappointed that no commercial hook & line organisation has publicly come out in support of our campaign for a sustainable bass fishery, but we are pleased that hook & liners are now the only commercial fishermen who can legally target bass.

However, we are extremely unhappy that whilst everyone else in the fishery is suffering pain to help recover the stock, for hook & liners it is business as usual. We have analysed the UK 2013 landings data to see what impact the new 10 tonnes per year restriction would have had:

• only 1 vessel caught more than the 10 tonnes in the year;
• 99% of vessels caught less than 3.5 tonnes; and
• 90% of vessels will not be at all affected unless the restriction comes down to less than 1 tonne.

The closure in February and March to protect the spawning stock sounds meaningful, but in fact is a complete con: in 2013 less than 1% of annual hook & line landings were in February in March!

So, much as we support sustainable commercial hook & line bass fishing, we will be pressing for restrictions that ensure hook & liners play their fair part in saving and regenerating the bass stock.

Impact on Demersal Trawlers and Seiners

The commercial fishing lobby argued that these métiers are needlessly discarding dead bass that is unavoidable by-catch and managed to get the by-catch allowance increased from 1% to 3%, subject to a 400kg per month cap.

We object to this for two reasons:

• why has this decision been taken without any evidence being provided on the level of discards or whether this is truly unavoidable by-catch?
• allowing bass to be landed as by-catch and sold provides a profit incentive to catch bass and a disincentive to fish more selectively.

Recreational Fishing

The UK Government has said “We were disappointed we could not move beyond the current scheme and agree a fairer package for anglers.”

George Eustice has listened to recreational bass anglers in 2016 and tells us he wants a fairer deal, but actions speak louder than words. Had the UK Government been truly committed to delivering a fair deal for bass and bass anglers it would have pushed harder for:

• no commercial bass landings to take place when recreational fishing is restricted to catch & release. Why should a recreational angler be unable to take a bass home to feed his family, when a commercial vessel fishing nearby can catch and land bass?
• a “percentage of catch” restriction on fixed netters.
• real restrictions on hook & liners, rather than trying to hoodwink the public with measures that sound meaningful but in truth have no impact.

Cefas report that recreational bass landings have been cut by between 63% and 85%. The 2017 rules repeat the injustice of last year’s measures. We must continue to fight and put even more pressure on George Eustice and the other EU Fisheries Ministers to redress the balance.

Fully Documented Fishery

ICES tell us that actual UK commercial bass landings are 3 times greater than shown by the official landings data. How can anyone manage a fishery without knowing the true level of landings? The EU Commission and the MMO are currently working on this issue and we will keep pressing for urgent action.

MCRS

The current 42cm MCRS will be reviewed by the EU Commission in 2017. It is too low and needs to be increased to 48cm to give bass a chance to mature and reproduce. Now that the bass fishery is recreational and hook & line targeting only, the MCRS can be increased without fear of increased discard mortality or netters complaining that they can’t afford to buy new nets with larger meshes. More mature bass will: enable the fishery to recover quicker; deliver increased profit per kilo for hook & liners; and improve the recreational bass angling experience. A no–brainer.

Bay of Biscay/Golfe de Gascogne

French small scale fishermen have warned that the destruction of the Northern bass stock is being repeated in the Bay of Biscay. Hook & liners’ landings in the first half of 2016 were down 43% on 2015. The EU Commission has found that despite no reduction in fishing effort, landings overall were down 13% in 2015 and down 20% in 2016, which strongly suggests the Southern bass stock is declining rapidly.

In November, the EU Commission floated the idea of some restrictive vessel catch limits for the Bay of Biscay. But it appears this idea has been dropped and the French Government has introduced its own, inadequate rules:

• A 2017 catch limit of 2,490 tonnes (a level that was only exceed twice in the last 7 years, according to French small scale fishermen).
• No allocation of the 2,490 tonnes to specific métiers, so it fails to give priority to sustainable hook & line fishermen.
• An increase in the MCRS from 36cm to 38cm, still far too low to protect juvenile bass.
• A 5 fish a day daily bag limit for recreational anglers.

Conclusion

In 2016, we have made great progress towards a sustainable recreational and commercial hook & line bass fishery – EU Fisheries Ministers have accepted our arguments about their environmental and socio-economic superiority. But commercial fishing pressure remains too high for a stock that is in grave danger and the new rules will not deliver the cuts that are needed.

The fight continues! We will need your continuing support in 2017 to force the fishery managers to cut commercial bass landings to a sustainable level."

It interests me how anglers react when their mates catch a really good fish, and I wonder how often that human trait known as jealousy rears its ugly face? Do you jump for unfettered joy when your mate lands that special fish, or do you kinda jump for joy but inside you’re thinking lucky sod, and why the hell didn’t that particular fish come to me?

It was a very, very special experience to witness this fine bass being caught and then released.

Through the course of going fishing and working around fishing I suppose I have seen and indeed caught a bunch of what I would class as pretty special fish, whether that be a what is now a fair few 10lb+ bass that I have seen landed from the shore - albeit I have not landed one myself yet - to numerous, more exotic foreign fish the likes of which the vast majority of anglers will never catch let alone see in their lifetimes. It’s obviously bass fishing which absolutely obsesses me these days, and obviously it’s a double figure bass which I suppose most anglers into this kind of fishing dream about catching from the shore especially. But as I said, I haven’t landed one yet from the shore, so when I either see one landed from the shore or hear about one that a mate has caught, does the fact that they have caught the magical 10lb+ bass and I haven’t yet make me jealous of their success?

I am convinced that it’s my obsession with photography as well as fishing which I believe removes any feelings of jealousy I might (reasonably?) have when a mate catches the fish of a lifetime. Sure, whilst I’d like to catch a 10lb+ bass from the shore, I guess it doesn’t bother me as much as some anglers - and that’s perhaps for two reasons. Firstly I’ve caught enough “special” fish around this glorious world to give me what I think is perhaps a different sense of perspective to those anglers who have not been as lucky as I have with my experience of sport fishing on a global and not just local scale, and secondly, it’s such a genuine pleasure to be able to take the photos of an angler cradling the fish of a lifetime. Hell, simply being there is enough for me.

I want the photos of such special fish and I’d sure love it if I caught a bass like that one day, but I don’t feel jealous. It’s just too damn special to see fish like that to feel jealous or envious, or at least that’s what I reckon. And nope, that doesn’t remotely make me a good person, rather it’s always going to be the whole fishing experience that does it for me, and whilst I am competitive by nature, for some reason fishing doesn’t bring that side out in me at all. Damn right I would like to catch a fish like that - and I might or indeed might not one day - but you can’t not be swept up in how happy it tends to make somebody feel to achieve a lifetime’s ambition. And as for anglers who don’t get excited about it? Well I would ask what’s the point in them going fishing in the first place?

One thing I will never understand is anything along the lines of so and so didn’t deserve to catch so and so fish because they haven’t been at it for more than a lifetime, haven’t paid their dues (whatever that crap actually means), or didn’t do their own homework and other rubbish like that. You hook that fish and you successfully land it, well I reckon it’s damn well done and you sure as hell “deserve” to beam with joy at catching it.

Like the bass in the photo above. From memory it was Michael’s second ever bass he caught (the bloke on the left), but he hooked it, he landed it, and he damn well “deserved” to be the proud captor. OK, so he was taken to the mark (as I had kindly been a few years previously), he was helped along with baiting up and where to cast etc., but does that then make his catching such a special fish any more or less “deserving” than say my mate Mark and the sheer, glorious joy that came across on the phone when he landed his bass of a lifetime in May last year? No, of course not. I was in Ireland at the time and the only tinge of regret I myself feel is that I wasn’t with him at home in Cornwall to share in the joy of the moment when he landed his first 10lb+ bass from the shore. No offence to our mate Andy, but I wish I had been there with my camera!

And here’s a look at my work in the new issue of Sea Angler magazine that will be in the shops very soon. Thanks Charlie for being so kind as to let me interrupt your fishing to shoot those photos. It will be fascinating to see if that particular spot will fish as well sometime this year as it did for us towards the end of last year………..

Yes, yes, yes! At last there is a jig head for the 120mm long Fiiish Black Minnow that sits between their 12g Shore Head and the 25g Offshore Head, and whilst it might seem a bit strange to be so damn excited by a mere jig head, I make no apologies at all. Yes, I am excited, and yes, I can’t wait to see how this new 18g “Search” jig head from Fiiish might offer me something a little different with the killer Black Minnow, and especially with the 120mm size that I so love for shore fishing………..

And so you know, yes, I do some paid work with Fiiish France, but they would never ask me to write a blog post about their products etc. (and I wouldn’t do it anyway) Believe me, if you knew the Fiiish lot over in Brittany then you would understand how vulgar and un-Fiiish like they would think it to ask me to do anything like that. Hell, I can’t even be a part of these “Team Fiiish” things that they put together in their different regions because I do paid work with them. I must therefore leave it up to you to decide if you want to trust that I am writing a blog post like this because I am quite simply very excited by this new 18g Search jig head. So there!

18g Search head (left), 12g Shore head (right)

Anyway, that boring stuff aside, if I think back to the bigger bass I have either seen landed or caught myself over the last few years, then I am pretty sure that the one single lure which has been responsible for the highest percentage of those fish is the Black Minnow. Sure, it goes without saying that there are any number of different paddletails out there that will catch you a heap of fish, but I still say thanks to Matt the designer of the Black Minnow for designing a paddletail system that in one fail swoop managed to sort out all my paddletail needs, save for swimming one very shallow and slow. And even then I have tended to move away from slowly swimming something like the Yamamoto Swim Senko in shallow water when regular senkos and indeed the OSP DoLive Stick have proved so frigging lethal.

18g Search head (left), Shore 12g head (right)

And from my early days of fishing with the 120mm/12g Black Minnow, I’ve been hankering for a heavier jig head that isn’t as heavy as the 25g Offshore jig head. For a fair while now I have been taking the 20g Shore Head that’s designed for the larger 140mm body and been using it with the 120mm body, and for those times when I need more than 12g it’s a combination that has worked really well. But now we have an 18g jig head that fits nice and flush with the 120mm Black Minnow body, and I am interested to see how the shape of the head is somewhat different to both the smaller 12g and larger 25g heads. What other options might this give me?

Well my admittedly very basic understanding so far of this new 18g Search head is that it’s been designed around fishing the Black Minnow along the bottom, so I can’t help but get all excited over again about how the Fiiish Portugal lad I know told me a couple of years ago how he’s fishing the lure along their extremely rugged and swell-beaten coastline - check here. I am sure that a bunch of you here like to fish the Black Minnow by bumping it along in a decent run of current - as do I - and I wonder if this new slightly heavier head might prove very good for that style of lure fishing. How about simply nudging it along over a sandy bottom?

A 10lb+ bass taken by bumping a 120mm Black Minnow along the bottom in a run of current

How about whacking the Black Minnow out into a nice bit of rough, tumbling water and simply swimming it back like you might a minnow style hard lure? Might this new 18g Search head and it’s somewhat fatter/flatter bottom side work well for that? And I bet that on the drop it the profile of the head has to help as well. Yep, I don’t actually know yet, but damn I love trying different stuff out to better understand how it might work for me, plus whether it might indeed give me a few more options without needing to change to yet another type of paddletail because I have such strong levels of confidence when I am fishing with the Black Minnow.

90mm Black Minnow with the new 8g Search head

Oh, and there’s also a new 8g Search jig head that fits the smaller 90mm Black Minnow body, a size that I don’t use enough but I need to rectify that this year because I have seen plenty of bass caught on them. You know that I don’t sell fishing tackle, but to save me from having to reply to a bunch of emails and FB messages, these new heads are available now in the UK, so keep an eye on your local tackle shop or on this website here. Come on springtime, we need you here now please………..

If you read my blog then you will know that along with my many lure fishing tackle issues, I have fallen head over heels for this co-guiding work I do with John Quinlan over in Kerry, Ireland. Sure, I know it’s work, but I bloody love it, and I was mighty pleased and even a little proud at how quickly our 2017 dates sold out. The October dates went almost straight away with repeat bookings, which I hope means that John and I are doing something right by working together like this, and the July dates finished filling up a few weeks ago.

A short bass fishing film shot in Kerry, SW Ireland, from our co-guided lure fishing trips in October 2016. 

And the result of this is that John and I have been speaking like the business minded grownups that we both are (?), and we want to go ahead with a plan we hatched late last year - which was to offer another co-guided four day trip later this year in November. If this seems late in the year to you to go bass fishing with lures, then please believe me when I say that it can actually offer some of the best bass fishing of the year down in that magical corner of the world that is Kerry. Sure, the weather can do anything - but then it can and indeed does at any time of the year anyway - but once again I come back to why that part of the world is so damn perfect for a fishing trip…………

There’s always somewhere to go fishing, whatever the weather does or doesn’t do, indeed I was speaking to John (remember, we have very grownup conversations!) yesterday morning and he could not recall losing a single day of guided fishing to weather in 2016. They also had some great bass fishing in November last year, indeed he reckons they’d have carried on catching bass on lures if they had been taking clients in December. Hence me feeling perfectly confident in putting the idea of this November co-guided trip out there and seeing if people are interested. Go on, give me another perfectly good excuse to get myself over to Ireland this year! If the fishing fires like it can that time of year it could be great, and if the fishing isn’t quite on fire we will find some fish and have an absolute blast. These are the dates we are proposing for this trip:

• Tuesday 14th November - arrive at Thatch Cottage
• Weds 15th, Thurs 16th, Fri 17th, Sat 18th - four days of guided fishing
• Sunday 19th November - depart Thatch Cottage

If you interested in coming along on this trip, then please contact me via the Guiding page on my website. Where is it? At the top of this page, and thank you for getting in touch.

Some tense moments in the opening Six Nations weekend, crumbs, but I do believe that winning when you’re playing that badly has to be good in the long-term for England - or is that just wishful thinking as we head for Cardiff tomorrow? My wife and I are heading over to the Isles of Scilly tomorrow with our two girls plus Storm for my mate Del’s wedding next week - and yes, the wrassing gear is coming with me - so I am not sure if I will be able to do much on the blog. I am incredibly honoured to be Del’s best man and I will be making a speech which of course will make no mention of him being without doubt the hairiest creature I have ever shared a room with. We all love him to bits and he’s marrying a cracker. Aren’t these girls lucky to have us blokes eh?! Many thanks and have a good weekend.

Are the bigger UK tackle companies slowly but surely waking up to the increasing interest in lure fishing for bass in the UK and Ireland? I note with interest how there are now a few JDM (Japanese Domestic Market) items in the new Shimano UK 2017 catalogue (you can see their 2017 new products here), and Daiwa have been offering a few of their JDM Morethan lure rods for a year or two now, plus numerous spinning reels of course. I think I have a fairly good understanding of the different marketplaces and the relative size of the “modern bass fishing market” compared to what many anglers think it surely has to be, but bearing in mind how slow to react these bigger companies tend to be here in the UK, I do wonder where bass fishing tackle might go now that a couple of the big boys in the tackle trade are increasingly getting in on the act…………..

I love how the bass lure market here in the UK over the last few years has tended to be driven tackle wise by a number of smaller but specialist companies who decided that it was time to start offering us the consumers the sort of gear a lot of us are now taking for granted as being readily available. Go through a Daiwa or Shimano catalogue from a few years ago and I bet you struggle to find say a 9’ lure rod rated say 8-28g that is suited to saltwater lure fishing for bass, yet I bet many of us have called that kind of lure rod “normal” for a while now. Same with a number of Japanese hard lures from companies such as IMA, DUO, MegaBass etc., plus any number of soft plastics from around the world. I can remember very well laying eyes on my first ever IMA lure at the CLA Game Fair not that many moons ago for example.

And now we have a couple of the bigger boys getting in on the act with a small but interesting array of JDM (sea) bass fishing tackle, and I also note how Shimano make specific references now to “sea bass” lure fishing in the new 2017 catalogue. Yes, of course, these companies have always offered big ranges of spinning gear, but it is only recently that they have begun to offer specialist bass lure gear from their Japanese arms that can suit the way that so many of us go about our bass fishing here in the UK and indeed Ireland.

I waggled a few of the roughly £250 RRP Shimano Dialuna XR “Sea Bass saltwater spinning” rods in the Art of Fishing tackle shop before Xmas and they felt very much like my kind of bass rods, plus I got to fish for a couple of days with the £249.99 RRP Shimano Exsence C14+ 4000 size spinning reel which felt suitably sublime (but then most spinning reels do feel like this straight out of the box, and only time will tell how they might last in a saltwater fishing environment). I can’t tell you any more about these rods and reels save for they were designed by Shimano Japan and the lengths/casting weights of the Dialuna XR rods are well suited to the lure weights that most of us fish with from the shore on a regular basis.

I wonder if a company like Shimano (and indeed Daiwa) which has such a highly developed range of bass fishing tackle over in Japan will ever bring more of these rods and reels into our marketplace, and whether they will make their extensive hard lure ranges available to us consumers (junkies?). I have heard some very, very good things about the Shimano Exsence range of bass lure rods for example and they sound right up my street. I also see that Shimano have launched a new, sub-£20 8-strand braid onto the market, called “Kairiki”, which I must assume is designed to compete against the fantastic and similarly priced and specced Daiwa J-Braid. Interesting times ahead…….

I would like to say a huge congratulations to Del and Vikki who got married on Valentine’s Day earlier this week. My wife and I plus our two girls and of course Storm boarded a little plane at Land’s End airport last Saturday afternoon in the pissing rain and a bit of a gale (we got to the Isles of Scilly in plenty of time for that truly epic England v Wales Six Nations march, holy frigging cow talk about a nerve-jangler!), but come Tuesday and their wedding day was blessed with the most glorious February weather imaginable. Obviously Del and I did a bit of wrassing on the morning of his wedding. We were incredibly honoured to be asked, and spending a few more days in one of the most special places I know on this earth doesn’t get any better. We went for the most glorious walk imaginable on Wednesday morning, had pasties on the beach for lunch, and then flew back to the mainland later on that afternoon. As good as it gets if you ask me. Congratulations Del and Vikki!

Mark and I had a go yesterday morning, and whilst there were a serious number of birds feeding on what we presumed was a mass of bait very close to the shore (thanks Gary for the tip off!), it didn’t seem to be the case that bass were there working on the bait as well. Or if they were, we sure as hell couldn’t catch them! Still, for February it has to be good to see this sort of activity, but to be honest it didn’t feel anything like a mid-Feb day………

Anyway, nearly two years ago Mark bought the lighter 9’ long, 7-23g Major Craft Truzer, a rod that I had my hands on for a little bit and seriously loved fishing with. Mark fishes a lot and he tends to alternate these days between that lighter Truzer and his beloved 9’6’’ Skyroad Surf. It is fair to say that the 7-23g Truzer has had a hell of a lot of use, including bass to 11lbs, “occasional” overloading with a Patchinko - Mark is more than happy to admit to this - being used to test the water depths in gullies, up and down ropes, endless cliffs, being strapped to the Vac-Rac rod holders on my car, and along the way he reckons he must have dinged it a few times. But the rod kept going, and I know how much Mark loves the thing.

So we’re both fishing the 6’’ OSP DoLive Stick yesterday morning (weighs 15g with a weedless hook setup) as we try for a February bass. Mark is fishing to the left of me and suddenly out of the blue his Truzer snaps as he makes another cast. It’s an unmistakable sound when a fishing rod breaks, and Mark said that the rod came around fine but snapped as the lure went out and the rod bounced back on the recovery if that makes sense - and the three different Truzers that I have used for bass fishing all recover very quickly, indeed I was fishing with the regular 10-30g 9’ Truzer myself yesterday morning and loving it as much as I always do.

So the rod has snapped on the butt section, a little bit below the join, and to be fair to Mark he didn’t remotely throw his toys out of the proverbial pram. In fact I would say that he was incredibly level-headed about what happened, along the lines of he’s had a hell of a lot of use from the rod, it’s a tool to be used and the rod owes him nothing, but all that aside we are both left scratching our heads as to how a lure rod can break like that after so much use. Mark had been fishing away with the Truzer just fine for at least an hour before it snapped, and he knows he didn’t catch anything behind him on the cast. So how does a lure rod break like that after all this time?

Mark putting his beloved 9' 7-23g Truzer through its paces a few months ago

To be honest neither of us has a clue. I thought my blog post about my continued love affair with my 9’ 10-30g Truzer the other day might elicit “various” responses from a few anglers who for whatever reason have ended up with their own, rather unique three piece Truzer, so as much as I welcome your comments on here and would encourage more of you to please engage with me and leave comments, please don’t waste your time by giving me anything along the lines of “told you so” etc. I haven’t come across anybody else who fishes with the lighter Truzer anyway, and the whole point of this blog post is not to damn a lure rod which Mark and I absolutely love, rather it’s Mark and I wondering how on earth a rod can break like that after such a lot of use………….

Any ideas? Can carbon weaken over time? Mark can’t recall any specific damage he might have done to the rod via a ding/tumble/fall or whatever, but if something along those lines had happened a fair while back, can that then manifest itself further down the line with the rod snapping clean during a cast, bearing in mind that he was casting a lure which was well within the rod’s weight range? The easiest thing would be to say that the rod is flawed, but how can it be when it’s worked so well for so long? Surely if a rod has a manufacturing flaw it’s going to break pretty damn early in its life? Is there anybody out there who knows what actually does happen with carbon rods over time, as opposed to hearsay and rumours which amount to squat?

This blog post is nothing to do with defending or damning certain lure rods, rather it’s something that has been bouncing around my head almost ever since I first started using what we might term “modern lure rods”, and was then rammed home when Mark’s rod broke the other day, as per Monday's blog post. How fragile are these lure rods that so many of now fish with, and if in a perfect world we should be looking after them a bit better, in reality can we possibly do so when we do what we do with them?

One of the many uses for a lure rod!

I would hazard a guess that many of you here who are are into lure fishing either come from or are still actively involved in your more regular UK-style shore fishing with beachcasters etc. Now while I haven’t cast one of these types of rods for a long time now and I don’t know much about the newer shore rods that are out there these days, they were always a pretty robust bit of carbon in my eyes. So whilst many of us got into lure fishing via that world as such, do the lure rods we tend to fish with these days bear any correlation at all to beachcasters? Do we kind of expect them to be banged around over the same sort of ground and withstand that sort of abuse when a thin-walled, delicate looking lure rod couldn’t be more different to say the old Conoflex Scorpion Sport that I so loved shore fishing with?

If you come from fly fishing then perhaps your take on this is a bit different, indeed something like a modern, lightweight and delightfully responsive 9’ 10-30g Major Craft Skyroad lure rod reminds me much more of a fly rod than it does a great big beachcaster - and wow are fly rods some delicate carbon tubes. Sure, I have seen some seriously big and powerful fish landed on fly gear over the years, indeed I have stood there open-mouthed on many occasions whilst photographing what this “delicate” gear can actually do in the right hands, but if that same rod which landed say a 50lb+ GT on a shallow sand flat then gets dinged with a fly in the cast, is dropped hard on a rock, gets trodden on or is high-sticked while landing a fish, it is most likely going to snap.

The photo above is literally a split-second before a 12-weight fly rod breaks as the angler tries to grab his fly line to land a lively but not very big GT out in the Seychelles. Look at the rod tip, where the fish is charging around, and how the angler is grabbing the line, and I am sure you can picture exactly how the rod broke. Angler error, plain and simple, but that same rod landed a stack of fish on that particular trip before it snapped. I have winced on numerous occasions when photographing fly and lure anglers landing fish and what is happening to the rod, but sure as night follows day these same anglers won’t actually know they are doing anything wrong in the heat of the moment.

As I said at the start, I am not here to tell you that so and so lure rod has or has not got a flaw or whatever, but I know what I do with my lure rods, and I would guess that most of you do the same. I do my best to look after them, but they get knocked about via use fishing, walking, wading, scrambling or whatever. They are transported to the actual fishing on the rod racks stuck to my car and from time to time I drop a rod or something like that. I would try and look after my beachcasters as best I could as well, but mistakes happen. A beachcaster looks like a more robust/thicker carbon tube to me though, whereas that lure rod you thrash about is surely a far more delicate tool? None of us exactly wants to be breaking fishing rods, but should we be more realistic with our expectations of many of these modern lure rods?

Mark kindly left a couple of comments on that Monday blog post about his Truzer which snapped, and I am going to copy and paste those comments here as an example of an angler being totally honest and upfront about what he has done with the rod and why he isn’t throwing his toys about: “Before I go and upset anyone I would firstly like to say that I am only describing what happened to my rod and no one else's Secondly I feel sorry for anyone who has had a rod blow up within a few hours use. I have owned my Truzer for just under two years so I think a manufacturing fault can be ruled out as I have abused this rod which is rated to 23gm. Yes I have launched a 28gm Patchinko with it I have slapped it on the surface of the water whilst casting. I Have dropped it and walked it tip first into a cliff face. Two weeks ago which was the last time I used it I dropped it with the reel attached on some jagged rocks Most likely this was the cause of the breakage, not to mention the countless times I have stuffed the tip into the sea bed while testing the depth of water. ANGLER ERROR I THINK SO. Just in case anyone is interested I will purchase another In no way has it put me off the rod. At work this morning while pondering what might have happened I realised that I did in fact drop the rod on my last outing albeit only about waist height but it did land on jagged rocks.” I wonder how many other anglers have been this honest with a rod breaks on them?

I really respect Mark for being so honest about what he has put his 7-23g Truzer through and at the same I then wonder how honest most other anglers are when a rod breaks and they try to sort a replacement out. I also wonder if many of us here are simply doing it a bit wrong from time to time with these delicate bits of carbon we use as lure rods (what, a man, wrong, seriously?), and on the flipside I wonder if indeed there are either a few rods which are not really fit for purpose, or via the manufacturing process that mistakes do happen and less than 100% quality rods do slip through? Look at various car recalls for an example of less than perfect quality control. Same with the Penn Clash spinning reels I used last year - the 2500 went “grindy” yet Mark’s 2500 hasn’t (after nearly a year of use as well I might add), and the 3000 one I have used a lot now is as smooth as it was when it first came out of the box. Go figure!

I will leave you with a comment that was posted on my Facebook page the other day, and to me this perfectly sums up my opinion that most broken fishing rods are down to some sort of angler error or mistake - and note the word “most” as opposed to “all”, and that it’s my opinion and not remotely fact. “Every kitchen waste I've ever unblocked has been as a result of fat going down. Every single customer has told me they NEVER EVER put fat down the waste. Every broken rod returned to a shop has been carefully looked after much like a newborn. Not knocked, bumped or similar.”

I don’t do regrets and life is for living, but from time to time I sit down and think about what I would do if I could go back in time and start my fishing life all over again, and what I might be doing in it - and yes, call it cabin fever if you like, but I am in the process of doing a bit more striped bass based research for various reasons at the moment, and when I go looking about at the shore based fishing for these fish, I wonder what I might do if I could go back to say the age of 18 and have another crack at life - with a bit of knowledge about what fishing I know is out there around this glorious earth………….

I have fished for stripers on a couple of occasions now, and whilst a fish like a tuna or a GT leaves them for dead in the speed and indeed power stakes, as with our own bass fishing it’s the whole culture/lifestyle/bit more “normal” vibe which surrounds the actual fishing that so floats my boat. What little I know of the striped bass world over in the US reminds me very much of what we do over here with our bass, only across the pond their stripers grow much, much bigger and of course there are a few more of them! If I was 18 right now and I had half a clue about what was out there, I reckon I’d be applying to live in the US to become a serious striper junkie. I mean come on, look at the video above and tell me you could not imagine immersing yourself in that kind of fishing and living it like you might well our own bass fishing.

I know the grass is always greener and I can’t help but read some of the recent news somewhat open-mouthed at the various US political goings on, but this blog post is only a bit of fun, and what’s the harm in dreaming about turning up on a deserted beach to find big striped bass smashing bait as far as you can see? How about standing waist deep in the middle of the night, trying your absolute best not to fall apart with adrenaline because you can hear stripers hitting bait in the inky blackness? I think back to launching big surface lures out into the famous Cape Cod Canal and connecting with stripers like the one above, which as pleased as I was, to be honest it didn’t raise an eyebrow amongst the numerous other anglers who were also into fish. I’ve caught far larger fish from the shore, but that whole being there and doing it thing kinda got to me on an emotional level. .

I can see myself cramming as much work in during the winter months and then completely giving myself over to chasing stripers from say May to November. Hell, I could call it “research” and put the expenses through my accounts! I’d buy a great big truck, kit if out for fishing, and then live in it while I chased striped bass until my arms were fit to fall off. Hell, sod the work and why not have a second home somewhere way down south for when winter hits the north east of the USA and you can run for warmer weather and species such as redfish, snook, tarpon etc. Holy cow now that’s a plan for my alternative life!

Talk about timing. I was at my desk a week or so ago, thinking about bass fishing and various ideas for blog posts, and something that has been gestating for a while in my head got me thinking about a blog post for this week on the subject of “follows” from bass. You know when you suddenly see a bass following your lure but it then turns away?

So my mobile goes off while I'm thinking about this and it's my mate Mark who proceeds to tell me about his brief try for bass that morning. He didn't catch (it is February after all), but he did see a bass clear as day follow his DoLive Stick in and then turn away. A follow. Exactly what I had been thinking about myself. Timing eh?

Anyway, I don't know about you, but as much as seeing a bass coming in on your lure is always a heart-stopper, if it turns away from the lure and heads off somewhere else, well this tends to wreck my head for the simple fact that it leaves so many unanswered questions via that one single moment. It’s not just that the fish you saw didn’t hit the lure - I'm working on the assumption that if you can see the bass then it has seen you - it's also a case for me that my head gets wrecked because I can't help wondering how many times the fish we chase might be turning away from our lures much further out but we aren't actually seeing it………..

Which in turn makes me wonder what I am doing wrong. You know those times when you thrash the water to a foam in perfect conditions and tides but come away fishless? Obviously there were no fish there says your head, but were there? You know when you fish say a hard lure for most of a session, don’t get a single sniff, then change to say a soft plastic and you hook a bass straight away? How often are there bass out there that are on the hunt for food but we as anglers are not putting lures in front of them that they want to hit? Or how often are bass out there but not switched on into a feeding mode? And so on.

OK, so whilst in some respects a follow and non-committal wrecks my head with the questions it asks of me, of course it’s us trying to beat nature and coming up short because we will never come close to understanding it all. If we had all the answers then fishing would not be the challenge that it is, and as much as I hope that I have learnt about fishing over the years, I happen to take great comfort if you like at how much more there is still to learn. By nature I am pretty black and white, but fishing surely is beset with so many grey areas that we simply don’t understand? Why would what seems to be a hungry fish rush in so enthusiastically on our lure but then turn away? Is it simply natural instinct that something is wrong? As ever, I choose to ignore those anglers who purport to have all the answers, because I simply don’t believe that it’s possible. Is it in fact a healthy dose of cabin fever that wrecks the head more than anything else?

If you are into your rugby then that was one strange weekend. I had a feeling Scotland might turn Wales over, and Ireland were surely odds on to beat a resurgent France, but I can’t work out how I feel about the England Italy game. I like to think that we were never in danger of losing, and it was frustrating as hell to have that team out there and for the most part not see them play expansively, but on the other hand I have to give credit to the Italy coaching lot for coming up with a tactic that so frustrated and confused England. Isn’t it interesting how professional players get thrown a complete curve ball and take so comparatively long to figure out a way to deal with it? In the heat of battle I might add, but pressure is an interesting thing. Maybe it’s a new Eddie Jones tactic to have England still in position for a grand slam whilst playing nowhere near their potential?

It always really interests me how we all “see” what is in front of us that little bit differently, and little in my mind illustrates this better than the photos we take - and because this blog is mainly about fishing, it is of course the photos of our fishing that I am talking about here. Whilst I can’t pretend that I find a great deal that catches my eye in a lot of the photos of fishing that I see all over the internet, I would also say that aside from the technicalities of what makes a “correct” photograph, none of us are “wrong” as such - because we all “see” what is it front of us a little differently, and with fishing there can be so much……….

Three of us were out bass fishing early one morning last year, and it’s a session that has stuck in my head ever since - but sadly not for the amazing fishing we had, because from memory I think we blanked on the bass front! Nope, it was how we all saw things that morning that got to me. As per above, it was one of those mornings when the world looked pretty damn incredible, and yes, damn right, you’re feeling a little bit smug that you’re up and out and seeing it before most regular people have even woken up. But then that’s the awesome fishing about fishing if you ask me - seeing so much stuff that non-fishing folk ain’t generally going to see.

So you have to bear in mind here that I am carrying a camera body and at least two different lenses in my rucksack, but most of you have smart phones that I am sure allow you to do a whole bunch of stuff as regards taking photos. And no, I don’t care about selfies! Now it could rightly be argued that the obvious shot is as per above - to put the angler in amongst that perfectly glorious light on a bit of a wide angle shot. Obvious it may be, but with that kind of very early light as per above, why the hell not I would ask? I can’t not shoot when it’s like that, and I noticed that Ben was snapping away as well on his smart phone. If a morning like that doesn’t affect you on some kind of emotional level then I would suggest you should be back home asleep or playing computer games……….

But what are you seeing when you’re snapping away? Damn right it’s the wide kind of shot that jumps out the most at you, but what else do you see? I shot a bunch of wide shots but I was also seeing something interesting out of my other eye and I couldn’t ignore it. I went for a lens change while Ben was still snapping a few pix on his phone, and as awesome as the sky was still looking, I changed over to a longer telephoto lens (70-200mm 35mm equivalent) to try and nail the shot that I could “see” in my head. Now Ben’s doing absolutely nothing wrong by continuing to bathe in that glory of light, sea and angler, but it fascinated me how he questioned my changing over to a longer lens. I don’t think he saw what I saw, just as I was not seeing exactly the same as he was seeing, and this fascinates me.

Ben’s a thoroughly nice guy who knows his onions backwards when it comes to fishing, and whilst photographing fishing is a big part of my job, it doesn’t then make what I shoot any more or less worthy than what he or indeed any other angler might choose to photograph when they are out fishing - but I “saw” another kind of photo when I was snapping those wide shots, and that photo that jumped into my head is the one above. I can’t help what I might “see” and just because I “saw” that tighter style photo above (early morning light playing on the water with Mark fishing and then a splash from a wave that gave me the motion I wanted), well that’s just me seeing things a little differently to Ben. Not right or wrong or better or worse - just differently.