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……...