Depending on where you live and/or do most of your fishing, this morning’s blog post may or may not be of interest to you, but it’s something which continues to fry my brain on a regular basis because my brain is wired in a certain way I guess. There’s a reef where I have done a fair bit of night lure fishing for bass ever since night lure fishing properly came onto my radar and I managed to prove to myself that the south coast of Cornwall did actually produce bass at night on lures and it wasn’t just a “unique to Ireland” thing. But this particular reef seems to fish very differently with only some very subtle differences in sea conditions…………..
Which might sound pretty obvious when of course if we go bass fishing we obsess about tides and conditions and so on, but do you think much about the “shape” of the sea I guess you could call it? Over most reefs I have fished at night here in the UK and over in Ireland I will quite happily take calm conditions at night, indeed I guess that a lot of us have found how night fishing with lures opens up a whole new world of possibilities because of that (my eternal thanks to Keith White for being THE person to first open my eyes up to this). On this particular reef I like to think that I have kinda got it sorted with the sizes and states of tide that tend to fish the best, indeed I have never, ever had a bass at night in what I think of as good conditions when the tide drops below a certain size.
So if we take this spot in isolation, I am more than happy when I’ve got calm conditions combined with certain sizes of tide. I then need the “right” state of tide to occur when it’s properly dark which in the middle of summer can obviously mean that a lot of tides and conditions I might like aren’t actually fishable because it isn’t actually dark. So far, so good then, and I don’t really mind what the wind direction is as long as I’ve got calm conditions. There seem to be some other variables at work though, and for the life of me I haven’t got a clue why these seem to affect the fishing.
From memory I have never landed a bass from this spot at night on good tides when there is a bit of what I would call a clean swell rolling in. I don’t mean wind chop, I mean those lovely clean waves that roll in on a bit of a swell with no wind to knock them about and create those more broken, “short” seas which I so like for surf fishing during daylight hours especially. I have done just fine on this mark when there’s a bit of that short, choppy sea “chopping” about - bear in mind I see no point in trying to fish rougher conditions on shallow reefs at night when you might be wading out and if it’s really dark you can’t see the sea coming at you - but I can’t recall ever landing a bass when there’s a clean swell rolling in. I’m not talking about a few inches by the way, rather say 1’+ of swell which at the end of the day isn’t much but for some reason it completely turns the bass off on this reef when it’s dark……………
Unless that is they are still there and I need to adapt how I fish for them when a bit of clean swell is rolling in, but to be fair to me I have tried a few different approaches and it hasn’t worked. Confidence is key though because when I read the conditions wrong and I find a bit of clean swell rolling in after the fairly long walk to get there, my confidence levels drop dramatically. I obviously fish it though because it’s a bit of a mission to reach the mark and it does my head in that I’ve got the tides and state of tide but just because these clean little to medium waves are rolling in I can’t catch bass there! It’s obviously not that the bass can’t cope with the clean waves, but I sure would love to know what the reason(s) might be. Welcome to the contents of my head on this rather beautiful Monday morning!