Any angler who claims that they land all the fish they hook is a liar in my opinion, but who here has hooked and lost the odd fish and it continues to haunt them? How big was the fish? If you saw the size of the fish AND then lost it, is this even worse? Did you do something wrong and you’re struggling to admit it to yourself? Or, as I happen to think here, is it the case that sometimes a certain fish simply isn’t meant to be?
One of the bass which continues to chisel away inside my head isn’t actually a fish that I hooked and didn’t land - but for sure there are a few of those anyway! Nope, it was a specific bass that my mate Del hooked and lost over in Ireland back in October 2012. Because the way our lives are with work and family it’s not always very easy for Del to get away and come fishing with me either here at home or over in Ireland, but back in October 2012 we sorted it out and headed over to Ireland for a few days around the Copper Coast area.…………
From memory we started off with some okay conditions and caught a few fish, but then it went really flat and we bled. Bear in mind that back then I didn’t have a clue about night fishing with lures, but towards the end of the trip a really nice local lad we know invited us to come and fish a session with him at some tiny little cove which for the life of me I couldn’t find again if I tried. There is a lot more to the Copper Coast than many visiting anglers realise, and I think at the time this local lad had landed a 10lb+ bass from this particular clove, plus he told us about a lost bass he had got almost to hand which he reckoned was an alarming size. So yes, you got it, we were slightly buzzing!
The area we were going to fish was really small and restricted, and this local lad pointed out the exact spot where he had had most success from. We quickly decided that Del should fish this spot because he so rarely got the chance to go to Ireland, so I fished a bit myself but kept well away from where Del was casting. Because I can’t not though, at the exact state of tide when this local lad fancied it the most I was working around Del with my camera gear, just in case something did actually happen. It usually doesn’t work like this but just occasionally the fishing gods smile upon me.
And blow me down if they weren’t shining their light on me that particular morning. I can’t remember the lure but it would have been a shallow-diver with the ground we were fishing, and Del who has loads of experience from the shore with big pollack and wrasse on lures went and hooked a train of a bass. If you know you know I would suggest, and I could see straight away as I lined up a few photos that this was a serious bass and wouldn’t it be bloody amazing if he got to see it and land it. There was no panic at all on Del’s part, and as you can see from the bend in the rod above, he’s not one of the 99% of UK and Irish anglers who is terrified of actually fighting a fish and instead plays around with it for ages. Nope, Del did everything right from the moment he hooked this bass.
But the fish went the wrong way. If the fish had gone left or straight out I see no reason why Del wouldn’t have landed this potentially serious bass, but instead the swine fish swam hard right and around a rocky point where Del lost the angle and any leverage on it. I don’t think the fish was doing anything “dirty” as such, rather it chose to swim in a direction which happened to completely work against the angler because of the lie of the land. I can’t remember if the line ended up breaking or the hooks pulled out, but if you know you know, and the three of us knew that Del had lost the potential bass of a lifetime. He didn’t really lose the fish as such, but that’s the expression we tend to use regardless. We will never know how big that bass might have been, and that’s what plays on my mind I guess, but from my point of view I get such an incredible buzz when a mate lands a really good fish. I was willing that bass not to head fast right when Del hooked it, but it bloody did, and I wonder if it still plays on Del’s mind like it does on mine? Fishing eh? Hell, I’d take the loss of a big bass over England’s current Six Nations campaign any day of the week……………
Earlier in the trip……………