It’s thanks here to a Welsh angler on Fabebook who posted a link to the YouTube video below - thank you Dan! - which comes from the highly respected French tackle company Ultimate Fishing. I have heard a fair bit about the sight-fishing for bass that some of the French bass anglers do mostly in various estuaries in the north west of their outstanding country I believe, and with the hugely talented Matt from Fiiish a few years ago now I got to see some big bass mooching around a specific estuary over there. We weren’t geared up for having a proper go at them but just seeing those bass moving around like that has stuck with me ever since………….
And then you watch a video like the one above, and if as a bass or lure or indeed any sort of angler this sort of fishing doesn’t interest you in some way then I’m not sure that fishing has really got you properly. You don’t have to want to have a go at it, but surely at the very least it's rather interesting to see bass fishing done like this? In some respects it reminds me of the whole night fishing for bass thing, in that when I first started to try and get into it around here I failed to the point that I almost convinced myself that bass simply wouldn’t take lures where I fish in the dark. Of course that is complete crap and I managed to change my preconceptions around in time, and I refuse to believe that stuff like the sight fishing for bass in this video is unique to the estuaries in France. I look at the ground the lads are fishing and I can think of a whole heap of locations I know of already, but I am not really targeting them like they sometimes do in the video. “Our” bass are the same as French bass, and as sure as my eyes light up when a mate catches bass on a lure I haven’t seen before, I look at a video like this and it really gets me thinking.
I speak a bit of French but my skills are pretty crappy compared to when I was about 18 and could converse in the language pretty easily, so I did turn on the subtitles for the video and the auto-translate thing wasn’t actually too bad (you need to turn subtitles on in YouTube and then go to the gear icon to translate them from French to English). There are a number of things which stand out to me from this video, but what really banged home was how the approach to this lure based sight fishing really reminded me more of sight fishing to say trout in a river rather than blind-casting again and again as mostly do with our lure gear. If you are intent on casting bigger lures to the horizon for hours on end then I would suggest that trying to find bass fishing like this might not be for you, but for me the whole thing about lure fishing for bass is that there is so much more to it than I could ever have imagined. I like trying different stuff.
Firstly I guess you need to go and see if you can find any bass mooching around the shallows or lying up in the bladderwrack etc. I can think of plenty of places where I might see bass, and I have seen some good bass moving around sometimes, so I wonder if it’s better initially to leave the rods and lures at home and simply go walking around with the dog and a pair of polarised sunnies and also some binoculars? If you fish estuaries at all then I would imagine that like me you often see mullet moving around, but we know that bass move around with mullet a lot of the time and they all seem to love hanging around areas of bladderwrack especially. I have such vivid memories of a particular 6lb bass which literally charged out of some bladderwrack to engulf my Gravity Stick Pulsetail a couple of summers ago, but one of the things that really stuck me from that French video was the small size of many of the lures. Do we need to scale right down if we are going to try and get to grips with this style of bass fishing?
Which I guess ties into what I imagine bass are feeding on in an estuary - crabs, shrimps/prawns, various baitfish species (seeing lots of very small baitfish locally at the moment for example) etc. I did actually catch a few mackerel way up an estuary the other day, but I can’t imagine that bass on (relatively big) mackerel is a major thing in most estuaries for much of the year, so again I come back to fly fishing for wild trout and matching the hatch in rivers. If big bass are moving around estuaries on the hunt for smaller food sources because that’s what is around, then surely as lure anglers we need to be offering them similar sizes of lures?
The auto-translate thing didn’t quite work properly at one point, but I think I picked up the fact that they are fishing far lighter fluorocarbon leaders for a lot of their sight-fishing estuary stuff than we would tend to consider for our more regular bass fishing. I haven’t yet photographed a fly angler who would ever consider using say 15-20lb fluoro leaders like we might regularly use, so again I wonder if we need to rethink things here. You might never try and do bass fishing like this, but it really interests me and I am quite prepared to fail on my quest to try something a bit different. Lighter rods and leaders with smaller lures and smaller hooks or jig heads etc., indeed I am about to go through my wrasse lure box to dig out a few bits and pieces in there because I am now thinking that they might work well. If you take a look below at a recent Savage Gear video we filmed where I am fishing for wrasse over in Kerry, the NED Salamander which worked so well for wrasse has to be worth a go, along with the NED Goby, Craw and Minnow. Same with the lethal Z-Man Punch CrawZ which I would not be without for wrasse fishing, indeed that strange and stretchy soft plastic which all these lures are made from - do not mix them with other lures! - and how buoyant they are might help. I will also be carrying a few of the smallest 10cm/16g size of Savage Minnow Weedless, but I am sure there are plenty of smaller lures which are worth a go, including smaller surface lures etc.
I also note with interest how they talk about increased catch rates more recently by taking this more subtle and refined approach in estuaries and applying it at night. This obviously means that you are not going to be sight-fishing, but if you know that bass are likely to be somewhere specific at a specific state of tide? I am by no means saying watch this space, and I am sure that some UK anglers are already bass fishing like this, but I am not and it really interests me. If nothing else it’s a good excuse for a nice dog walk……………
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