It was only a few years ago that I caught my first ever bass in the UK in February, then I am pretty sure it was March last year when I caught my first ever UK bass in that particular month. January has tended to produce a few fish on the open coast around here when every single thing has aligned - tides, conditions, water clarity etc. - and early April is when something often seems to change and the bass are back on it…………….
But I would suggest that the world of UK lure fishing for these fine fish is continuing to change. More anglers are discovering the joys of a lighter tackle approach for a feisty fish, and in turn I am sure that more anglers without the “burden” of how it used to be is resulting in more of “what the hell, why on earth not try catching bass on lures when it was previously thought impossible?”. I have never believed that come a specific time of year, every single bass inshore in the UK suddenly turns around and heads for their spawning grounds, and perhaps this winter especially has shown what might be possible in the future.
I could bang on about these creature bait lures, but with my vast experience of three whole bass on them, I don’t feel very qualified to try and give you any definitive answers. Plus it’s fishing at the end of the day, and how can human beings capable of logical thought possibly know all there is to know about creatures which I believe are doing what they do based purely on instinct honed over many more years than we have been ambling around this awesome planet. What I personally think is that a lot of anglers - like me - have traditionally left the quieter estuary waters alone during the colder months because we don’t believe that the few (or many?) bass which are hanging around are catchable on the techniques or lures we might more commonly turn to. Plus the water is often really coloured up and so on.
But what about deliberately slowing right down and offering something - crab imitation, paddletail, straight stick, prawn, who knows what? - tight to the bottom where it seems to make sense that these estuary based, over-wintering bass seem to be doing their feeding. A general lack of baitfish to chase, we know that bass eat a lot of crab and other such bottom-dwelling prey species anyway, I choose to take my hat off to the anglers who are pushing stuff forward AND then kindly sharing their exploits and thoughts online.
What all this might have done though is to give some of us some unrealistic expectations for the time of year. I will keep trying to catch bass on the open coast for most of the year because I love this style of fishing, but would I really have expected to catch and then been disappointed to blank in February? I hit the open coast on Saturday in some lovely conditions which I had been tracking for a few days. You can never truly expect to catch I guess, but I felt very confident of seeing at least a bass, and especially when I got to a certain little point closer to low water where I knew I would find lots of rip currents and extra turbulence.
I never even had the merest hint of a bass nibbling on whatever I was offering them in some glorious sea conditions, and I was disappointed. It’s the middle of February and I can count the number of bass I have caught on lures on the open coast during this miserable month on both hands I reckon, yet things are changing and I felt so confident when I saw the conditions. I have so much to try and learn about seeing if I can take what I am learning about the winter estuary fishing and apply it to waters that I know well, but the more I experience this type of bass fishing, the more I think that it’s a bit like chasing a different species of fish with how the marine world can feel when you move around between estuary and open coast. Which in turn makes me love these amazing fish even more.