There is a specific estuary spot which my mate Mark and I sometimes fish that really, really gets me thinking, both with what we have seen, what we have caught, but almost more importantly, what potential we think the location has but which we haven’t been able to fully realise yet. Mark has had fish close to double figures there, I know he hooked and lost a serious bass which he saw as clear as day, I have had some nice fish eat surface lures literally right off the end of my rod tip - but there is so much more to the place which I know we haven’t got to grips with yet…………….
I had a bass turn right over one of those little Savage Gear Pop Walker 9cm/11g surface lure last summer which to be honest still haunts me a bit with the size of the flank and tail I saw. We have both had a few occasions when big bow waves have charged in after our Gravity Sticks but then the fish turned away as they literally almost ran out of water. I don’t think there are loads of big bass mooching around, but the chance of a serious fish exists. The more I think about the location and how I have approached it in the past, the more I believe that I need to change how I fish it.
I have been watching some of those US freshwater bass fishing videos on YouTube recently to see how they sometimes fish literally into the middle of big weed beds. I know the fish are different but I do wonder how many of our big bass are sometimes literally sitting in the bladderwrack and we need to get at them rather than wait for them to come to us. I look at something like the Tokyo Rig and I wonder if a more direct way of presenting certain soft plastics and being able to almost hold them in place for a bit might be worth thinking about. Even if I am to fish some of the channels and holes in and around the bladderwrack, I feel like I need to explore various ways to keep my lure in the potential kill zone for longer. With a far higher degree of subtlety as well.
A few years ago three of us fished a spot which I had photographed for mullet many years previously and we thought it was worth a go for bass. I remembered a lot of bladderwrack and current on the outside, and I will never forget when a decent bass literally launched itself out of the edge of a big patch of bladderwrack and impaled itself on my Gravity Stick Pulsetail. This was just before the lures were first launched and I had to literally skull-drag the bass across the top of the weed to unhook, photograph and release it.
It was one of those fish caught from a particular type of mark which got me thinking a lot more about estuary fishing and how much more there is to it than many anglers realise. I used to think that you found the mouth of a shallow estuary and did nothing more than bump soft plastics down a strong run of current on the last of the ebb, but then again I used to think that basically all lure fishing for bass was done over shallow reefs with shallow-diving or surface lures. Chances are if you are reading this then you are way down the addiction to bass fishing route - like me - but did you honestly ever realise how much interesting and fun stuff there can be with targeting one species? I’d have walked away from bass fishing years ago if all I did was fish shallow reefs because I can’t be doing with fishing the same way in the same areas all the time.
As an aside, it’s interesting to read some of Marc Cowling’s thoughts on all this in the “What the Future Holds” chapter in his new book Bass Lure Fishing - A Guide’s Perspective - Volume 2. Of particular interest is some stuff he says in there about “creature baits” which ties in very much with some of my thinking and planning for later on this year and a specific spot or two. Review of this fascinating book to come, but you can pre-order it by emailing Mark on southdevonbassguide@yahoo.com
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