I fully intended to watch what was by all accounts an incredible womens’ rugby World Cup final on Saturday morning, but try as I might I couldn’t resist going fishing to where I have been catching a few bass recently on the early flood tide. The forecast looked really good with some nice onshore winds, but the plan was to fish it on a completely different state of tide to see what happened to keep on learning more about what is some new ground to us. How much fun is it to fish new ground and try working things out, and especially when it chucks up some fish? I don’t quite know why this mark has stayed relatively clean with the weather we’ve been getting recently, but it’s interesting at the very least.
Essentially the mark is an extensive and very rough ground reef system with loads of sharp rocks sticking out of the water all over the place. These in turn help to create all sorts of lovely bits of swirling current when the sea is bouncing, and the depth is anything but consistent - from rocks sticking out to reef sitting just under the surface at high tide to much deeper gullies and sand patches and everything in between. Bass heaven at the end of the day, but I think back to when I was first taken out shallow reef lure fishing for bass in south east Ireland. I could take you back to the spot today and show you all the parts of that reef we didn’t fish because we didn’t have the knowledge or the right lures to be able to access all of the ground.
And it could have been a bit like that on Saturday morning. You could of course have spent the session banging lures out to the horizon - there were in fact a couple of cormorants feeding which I covered with a Seeker but didn’t get any bass - but all the really interesting ground is literally within lobbing to gentle casting distance. All that ground gets even more interesting when you can deliberately and precisely cover all the nooks and crannies and literally feel your lure bumping over the snaggiest stuff to fish in amongst gullies and rips and holes. Any bass that were caught or dropped or bumped on Saturday morning were in close.
I would politely suggest that however shallow various hard lures might swim, you simply can’t fish them in the same way you can so deliberately fish a soft plastic rigged on a weedless single hook - which means that with a hard lure you can’t fish at least some of the most inviting looking ground. Cost of the really good hard lures aside, I just happen to think that knowing when to and when not to clip them on is a big part of successfully covering the sort of ground we were fishing. Soft plastics rigged on single weedless hooks - with or without belly-weights - for me have massively contributed to my bass fishing and the ability to look at various locations with a different set of eyes because I can see different potential. Why do you think that my working with Savage Gear started with me asking if we could please make what ended up as our Gravity Sticks? Soft plastics designed to be fished on single weedless hooks because it’s such an important weapon in my armoury.
Mark’s better stamp of bass (than I had been catching on this mark on the early flood tide) came on a paddletail called the Mishna Eel from Sunslicker. He also dropped a really nice fish after I had had to head home. I have seen him catch plenty of fish on these lures, and he also rigs them on weedless hooks. I believe he was using a 6/0 hook which had a 10g belly-weight on it. The sea conditions were pretty bouncy, and for all my messing around with various jig heads etc., I still think that a belly-weight on a weedless hook which does indeed act as a bit of keel on the belly of the soft plastic really helps with stability in bouncier seas or stronger currents and rips, and around very rough ground especially. I am also perfectly happy using the 4/0 2g or 6/0 3g belly-weight weedless hooks which we made for our Gravity Sticks, and then add one of those rather clever Balls Clip On weights to the eye of the hook if you need more weight and you don’t have any heavier hooks with you (the clip on weights come in 5g, 7.5g, 10g and 15g, there’s a kit with all of them here).
Another thing I am experimenting with is upping the strength and therefore diameter of my braid when I am fishing ground as hectic as this. It’s absolutely nothing to do with the relative size of these fish we love so much, but I want to see if I can feel anything remotely negative about fishing with a slightly thicker mainline. I know that a tight braid against a sharp rock is usually going to fail when you’re hooked up, but I wonder if a thicker mainline might save me a fish or two? I don’t know but I am prepared to try, so I have loaded up my (absolutely stunning to fish with) Penn Authority 3500 with 36lb Berkley Sick X8 braid. So far I can’t notice any difference to the 24lb Sick X8 I have been fishing with so much recently, save for a slightly lower line level when you start the retrieve if you have really banged a lure out. If you had to ask me why I think Sufix 131 is the best braid I have ever fished with I would struggle to describe quite why, but I guess that you fish with certain items of tackle which sometimes just really suit how you fish. I am fast falling for this Berkley Sick X8 braid.
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