I am sure it depends a lot on where you live and/or do the bulk of your bass fishing, but I do wonder if the word “season” is no longer really applicable with what is going on. Since I have lived here in south east Cornwall I have kinda felt that 1st April is the start of the new bass fishing season, and that’s for no other reason than it sits just fine with me and any bass I catch in early January I’d think of as the previous season’s fish. What happens now though with a few fish in February and now March?
So it’s not as if I have been covering myself in bass related glory the last couple of winters, but if you read this blog you know how I have been getting on. I don’t believe that we have close to a consistent year round fishery, at least not where I do most of my fishing anyway, but once again we have found some fish early in April. Is this the new season as such kicking off? I can’t help but notice that the water out on the coast is clearing up nicely after all that poo the other day, plus the tides have been building into a smaller set of springs which I far prefer to the monster tides.
When I say we, I use that word rather loosely by the way - because I haven’t found any early April fish yet. A couple of mates went out on Monday afternoon - I couldn’t make it - and Andy caught this bass above he put at easily 5lb+ (thanks for letting me use your photo Andy). I was over the moon to hear this news when they were on their way back home, but my brain is wired to then wonder whether a few fish might have been found if we had got these favourable conditions say a couple of weeks ago. You can never know, but March was mostly a write off the same as last year, and I simply don’t believe that when we manage to find fish in early April around here that we are catching the first bass to move back in.
Anyway, so Andy caught a nice fish on Monday which came on the 13cm Savage Gear Slender Scoop Shad rigged on the 6/0 3g belly-weight weedless hook we did for the original Gravity Sticks. You can obviously only catch a fish on the lure you have on the end of your line, but since early last year these Slender Scoop Shads have done the business time and time again and I don’t go out bass fishing now without a few of them in one of my two lure boxes. They offer me different options to the Gravity Stick Paddletail with how I tend to fish with them both.
Mark and I headed out before first light yesterday morning, and it was bloody freezing in a fairly fresh E/SE wind. I actually put a pair of gloves on because it was so cold, but the water looked pretty good and thankfully there wasn’t much weed in the water from those storms the other day. I was obviously feeling a lot more confident than I was in March, helped of course by the knowledge of Andy’s fine fish the day before. I fished my socks off for a couple of hours and didn’t bother the scorers, but about halfway through the session Mark radioed me to say that he had just caught and released a bass of about 2lbs. The lure? Yep, exactly the same as Andy was using the day before. Slender Scoop Shad. Whatever does or does not happen now, those two bass give me a huge jolt of confidence to really get back on it. A decent night’s sleep is so overrated……….
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