There’s a lot to process from last week out in south west Portugal, not least the fact that in many respects I was somewhat humbled by the fishing and the conditions. I went with very realistic expectations and not for one second did I expect to find the sort of bass you can see in some of Grant Woodgate’s videos crawling their way up my line (he’s the bloke behind Samson Lures). I hoped of course, and there’s always a chance, but I have travelled with my work and fishing enough to be realistic. I caught precisely two bass in a week of hard fishing, with the biggest being about 4lbs. I saw an easy 8lb+ bass swimming around off the edge of a bit of reef but she wasn’t interested - and I saw a hell of a lot of very big waves and big walls of white water coming at us the like of which most bass anglers have never experienced………….
I didn’t go completely blind because the lad I was fishing with (another Henry) had a few bass out there last year, with the biggest one he caught weighed on his BogaGrip at a very fat 14lbs. He fished bloody hard and found a few good looking spots, but the swells we had last week were somewhat larger than Henry had last year around the same time. There are plenty of viable bass fishing options if you head south and not west, but my understanding is that the further west you go along that south coast, the swell can sometimes get really big as well. It’s not some automatic backup. At the end of the day it’s saltwater fishing and you have no choice but to take whatever the weather does.
Quite aside from my failing to hook or land a decent bass last week, almost the most frustrating thing from my point of view is that I can’t properly show the scale of some of the waves we saw rolling in on the west coast. I shot some photos I am really pleased with, but neither photos or video can compare to being there and trying to fish in amongst seas like that. Bloody hell it was impressive at times, but of course the swells can get far larger than what we got. For the most part they were big enough to make it tough though. For sure we went looking for areas where we might get some protection from shallow reefs and so on, but in reality we were often faced with huge tables of violent white water where you were struggling to properly fish any kind of lures in viable looking areas.
It’s some incredibly exciting fishing to know that bass to over 20lbs have been caught from those waters though. Every time you managed to put a lure into decent looking water I felt like we were in with a some sort of chance, but of course we were fishing with a lack of local knowledge so we were trying our best to apply what we know about bass fishing to locations and tide times we simply didn’t know much about. I don’t think winter bass fishing out there is ever going to be a numbers game, indeed I have been talking to a number of local and visiting anglers who blank a lot of the time and would expect to do so. But there’s always that chance…………
One big thing I am very wary of here though is encouraging anglers to go bass fishing out there in winter especially, because I have come back with the feeling that most bass anglers would be far better off not doing this fishing. I didn’t go to SW Portugal to try and promote it. It was a fishing trip for me where I was always going to shoot some photos because I can’t not, but it was my first time there and I wasn’t remotely on a mission to try and attract anglers to come along like I might with my guiding work in Ireland. I’m talking about it here because it was a truly magical coastline in a lovely part of the world and a few days of wall to wall sunshine and decent temperatures sure felt pretty damn good in January.
But the simple fact is that if you aren’t used to fishing some potentially big and dangerous sea conditions then I wouldn’t even entertain the thought of jumping on a plane and trying to hook a bass of a lifetime along that west coast especially. I know that some of you here will look at my photos and read my words and think that I am exaggerating the conditions we got (which weren’t remotely extreme compared to what it can be like), but there is nothing I can do about that. There was a part of me that debated not saying a single word anywhere online about my trip last week, but there is plenty of video footage of big bass in some bouncy conditions on various YouTube channels so it’s not as if Portugal is some big bass fishing secret. There are also plenty of estuaries along both coastlines if you go looking and like many places I believe there is a lot of different types of bass fishing out there.
I am very aware though that even with my relative experience of fishing some fairly big conditions at times down here in Cornwall, I was seriously taken aback by some of what we found and tried to fish last week. On one beach/reef we got talking to a couple of experienced German surfers who spend much of the year out there. They went out surfing but were back at their car within half an hour. I asked them why and they told me they got caught in a serious rip current we could see, indeed I had been trying to swim soft plastics in it a while earlier. The surfers were dragged all the way down the beach and smashed into some rocks. It was the type of fishing mark where you could very easily be lulled into a bit of deep-wading out to some more distant rocks and then a bigger set rolls in and that wall of white water takes you off your feet and you end up in that rip. I wouldn’t wear waders on that west coast if you paid me.
We stayed in a little village called Vila da Bispo which is an hour and a half or so from Faro airport and close to both coastlines. Henry was already booked up in some accommodation so I found somewhere close by, but Grant of Samson Lures does have a rather handy two bedroom house in the same area which can be rented - check here. Hell, even if you don’t head down there for some hardcore bass fishing it’s a lovely part of the world to explore. I will get onto the gear we used to try and cope with the conditions next time around, but until then you can rest assured that my brain is bouncing away with how much more I need to learn about lure fishing to stand a better chance when I return………………….