I was fishing on the early ebb tide yesterday afternoon, just as the current started to dribble past the edges of the bladderwrack. There were plenty of smaller bass hitting bait and numerous other signs of life, indeed it was one of those sessions where you end up giggling at hungry little schoolies hitting your surface lures again and again but often failing to hook up. But then out of the blue I got one of those takes…………
Which annoyingly didn’t connect, but out of the multiple hits from small bass and a few of them landed, that one big and really proper surface hit left me open-mouthed. I have been lucky to have landed a bunch of good bass on surface lures so I like to think that I know when a proper fish comes along and has a go. I can still visualise the hit from this bass here, but one other hit from out on the Copper Coast on the IMA Salt Skimmer a fair few years ago still haunts me to this day. It was more like a mini-GT than a bass with how violent the hit was, but like a complete tit I was working out the angles for photography as I got the fish close to me - and ended up losing the bloody thing in some really thick weed because I wasn’t concentrating on the scrap. A friend of mine was fishing a fair distance away and he still heard the hit from that fish. A proper case of angler error!
Now the surface take I got yesterday afternoon was not in that sort of open coast league, but I often find that bigger estuary bass are a bit more “lazy” with how they swirl and chow a surface lure. Part of yesterday’s shock was because it kinda came a bit of out of the blue with those small bass around, but this one hit could not have been more different. An almost slow motion eruption of water as the flank of the bass came partly out of the water and the fish turned on my surface lure, but for whatever reason the fish didn’t connect, and for all my trying and wishing and pleading, it didn’t come back. I did get one more decent swirl at the lure on the way back in, but it didn’t look like the same stamp of bass. I will never know how big that bass was, but at about 3.30am this morning when I woke up with a start because I was dreaming/thinking about it, bloody hell it was massive!
As ever you can only catch or get interest via the lure you have clipped or tied on, but a fair while back I started to get some samples through of the reworked Savage Gear Pop Walker surface lures which Markos over in Greece has been hard at work on. I kinda liked but never loved the original Pop Walker for various reasons, but these new Pop Walker 2.0 surface lures are seriously doing it for me. The biggest 115mm/20.5g version absolutely frigging flies, and it’s really stable when you walk it back to you. I didn’t actually click until recently that these new Pop Walker 2.0 surface lures remind me of the Lucky Craft Gunfish lures, but I don’t have a big history with the Gunfish lures like I know some anglers do so I don’t feel qualified to try and compare. What I do know is that with some estuary fishing I have been doing recently, I am really, really liking the smaller Pop Walker 2.0 90mm/10.7g, and that was the surface lure I had on yesterday afternoon when a little bit of sea came alive to mess my sleep up for many nights to come!
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