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- Herausgeber: Merlin Unwin Books
- Kategorie: Lebensstil
- Sprache: Englisch
James Batty seldom ventures further than 20 miles from his Cornish home. He fishes from the rocks and beaches in a handful of places and that is enough for him. Generous with his knowledge and full of fresh ideas, Batty catches bass with lures, flies and bait. It's a myth, he says, that you need expensive gear – he beaches plenty of big bass yet is a tackle skinflint. He loves to fish in those pre-dawn hours beloved of insomniacs, when the tide brings the big feeding bass close in to the shore. The book's real focus is on understanding bass behaviour, then using that understanding to work out the place, time and method. Some bass-fishers obsess over conditions – too flat, too rough, too something. James Batty offers ideas as to how to catch bass in any weather or sea-state. His book isn't just about the hows-and-whys of bass fishing, it is a wry look at life and it will make the reader laugh – a lot.
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Seitenzahl: 306
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019
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To my wife Shelley
In spite of noises in the middle of the night, slimy clothes in the laundry basket, and the persistent hum of rotten squid in the car, she remains my best friend.
Contents
Author’s Preface
11lbs 6oz, caught in a November storm on whole squid at about 15 yards range. People who see me fishing sometimes tell me I should take casting lessons, but better bass tend to feed very close in. I’m also given tips about good rods on sale for a few hundred quid. No thanks, I do OK with my cheap tackle – the bass are in the water, they can’t see what’s in my hands. They can’t see my lucky woolly hat either, but that’s an essential bit of kit. It protects my brain, and bass fishing’s a thinking game.
To catch a big cod you fling your gear miles into the surf, and that takes athleticism and coordination. For a big turbot you fork out for a charter boat and spend a few days bobbing about on the ocean wave. A big shark calls for a boat trip and some pricey kit as well. A marlin means going overseas. And that’s why I love my bass: even a clumsy buffer like myself – who dislikes boats, resents expensive tackle, and hates long distance travel – can do pretty well as a bass fisher. The keys to successful bass fishing are almost all in the mind.
By the way there are a few snaps of me later in the book, but I’m not as handsome as most of my bass. Rode hard and put away wet, that’s about my style.
Stay safe, and tight lines to one and all.
CHAPTER ONE
What To Expect
What’s going on?
This isn’t a book about how to catch bass. It’s a book about how I catch bass. There’s a difference.
First of all I only fish a very small patch in west Cornwall. Petrol’s not cheap, I don’t like driving, and I never venture more than about fifteen miles from where I live in Mount’s Bay. So for all I know, what I’ve learned on my rocks and beaches may be useless if you fish in the terra incognita that lies east of the Tamar – or even east of Helston. I doubt it. It’s not as if I’m baiting up with lugworm pasties or using lures that sing Trelawney, so I reckon a lot of my dodges should work almost anywhere. But I don’t have the wet boots experience to back up my view; and that might be important, because some of my ideas seem to be at odds with the conventional wisdom.
I’ve read the classic writers – Clive Gammon, Des Brennan, John Darling, Mike Ladle – and they’ve given me a solid grounding of knowledge. But I’m a tinkerer, so I’ve used that grounding to build very personal approaches to my sport, especially in dodgy conditions. When I run into other fishers in a calm or a raging storm, they describe what I’m doing as interesting (if they’re diplomatic), weird (if they’re less guarded), or downright barking daft (if they’re the sort of straight-talkers who call a spade a bloody shovel). I know my sometimes unusual and somewhat self-taught Cornish methods work for me. I can only hope they’ll work for you too.
Second, I never fish from boats. About forty-five years ago my brother and I ran a charter-boat in East Africa, and that cured me of any possible wish to have a boat again. You don’t really own a boat, it owns you. So unless you enjoy all the maintenance and trailing and suchlike, buying a boat’s like starting a prison sentence. And I’m not interested in fishing from other people’s boats either. A local skipper tells me his clients come back at the end of a trip and say, ‘I caught a cod’; and he thinks, ‘No you didn’t, I caught a cod, you just reeled it in.’ I’m with the skipper: finding the fish is the challenge and the fun, and I’m not going to pay a hefty charter fee to miss out on it.
Third, I don’t fish live-bait very much. I hate carrying stuff, the idea of setting out like a rod-toting window-cleaner or ice-cream seller, with a big bucket or a cold-box, would be enough to keep me at home. When I come across a promising live-bait – a whiting that snaffles my worms, a sandeel scraped at the water’s edge, a small mackerel or pollack that grabs my lure, a prawn or blenny in a rock-pool – I use it. But live-baiting isn’t one of my staples even though I know it can be a terrific way of getting into the fish.
Fourth, as the years go by I fish more with bait than with lures or the fly. When conditions look spot-on I still take the lure-rod or the fly-rod for a wander, but my default setting’s to head for a beach. I just enjoy it more. A lot of the challenges around lures and the fly are physical – mud-tromping along the coastal footpath, scrambling over slippery rocks in the dark, casting a plug into a tight spot in a gusty cross-wind, flicking a fly-line through a raging hoolie, ice-dancing on wet seaweed – which may be why younger, more athletic fishers are such fans. On the beach I do a good deal of walking – to find the fish, the better surf, the weed-free patch – but the real exercise is in the head. It’s all about wondering what to try next, what the bass could be eating, where the food might be concentrating. And as I grow older I seem to prefer the mental workout.
Lastly, I’m sure I don’t always fish in the most productive way, I fish in the way that makes me happiest. For instance I focus mostly on early mornings, from a couple of hours before first light. Why? Well, I catch my fair share of decent bass in that slot, and I’m pretty convinced they feed harder in the last hours of darkness than at any other time. But mostly it’s because I love early mornings, when there’s nobody else around, when the seals are so laid back that they sit beside me on the shore, and when I know I’ll see a sunrise and a steaming hot coffee at the end of my outing.
Some folk likely will find the how-and-why stuff boring, so I’ve included lots of fishing stories to illustrate the way I approach my sport. They’re in italics. For obvious reasons they tell of successful outings. We all have bad days, but I try not to dwell too much on the trip when I caught one tiddler and a load of weed, lost a favourite lure, half-drowned in the rain, ripped my waders on a bramble, dropped my tackle-bag in dog poo, and found my car wouldn’t start. When the fishing’s rotten I hope I learn something about my marks, but writing or reading about a good bass is a lot more fun.
So with all those disclaimers why am I bothering to write a book? Definitely not because I think I know everything about bass fishing. Nobody does, nobody ever will, and if they did, I’d take up snooker or competitive leek-growing instead. Bass are always going to be somewhat mysterious, that’s why it’s such fun to chase them. Some folk, often fishing guides, say you just need to work out ‘the pattern’. Then you’ll know where, when, and how to make guaranteed catches. I look at these confident assertions the same way I listen to investment bankers telling me they can predict the stock market. The pattern or the financial model is bang-on when you look at what’s happened in the past. And when you look at what might happen tomorrow or next week, it’s about as reliable as an election manifesto, a weight loss advertisement, or a drunken palm-reader with a fraud conviction. I don’t think anyone can say with confidence what bass will do, and I’m entirely sure I can’t.
No, I’m putting my ideas on paper because a lot of people have asked me to do just that. I’ve posted catch reports on a couple of forum sites, always with a bit of background about how I caught the fish. Then other fishers have sent me messages: ‘I read what you did and I thought you were totally nuts. But I was blanking, so I decided to try some of your loopy ideas. Guess what, I had three good bass. You should write a book.’ One chap suggested I collect all my posts and just bodge them together.
But that really didn’t work. Quite a few of my write-ups were foul-mouthed rants about the odd half-wit surfer who manages to run over my line three times in succession on a two mile beach, or the abject dirt-bags who leave bait wrappers and balls of mono on my favourite rock marks; and most were about well-sized bass, because forum-readers always want a photo of a whopper. But a lot of my best catches have been nothing-special fish winkled out against the odds, and a lot of my best trips have been when I managed to help another fisher break a run of blanks. And I’ve realised that the greatest pleasure I take from my outings is when I can give someone a tip that turns defeat into victory. Best of all is when the other bod’s a youngster. Grown-ups have learned to play life a bit cool (as in, ‘What a pleasant surprise, I’m really quite chuffed’), but juniors wear their hearts on their sleeves (as in, ‘That’s totally out-effing-rageous, this is the best day of my whole life, and I’m in love with that bass.’).
First light on a summer morning, I was wandering along a rough and weedy stretch in Mount’s Bay, tossing a little Toby whenever I saw a swirl. The bay was jumping with whitebait, every predator in the sea had come to join the feast. I had a couple of mackerel, a pollack, and a few bass. Nothing enormous, just some good eating fish, so I kept the mackerel and a bass. Rounding an outcrop I ran into a lad of about fourteen so I stopped for a chat. He was on holiday, this was his first outing with a brand lure new outfit. He’d saved his newspaper-round money for a year to pay for it, and he’d chosen his rod, reel, braid, and lures after days of research in the on-line forums. He was fishing a big shallow-diving plug, something Japanese, expensive, and about five inches long. He’d caught two pollack and a mackerel. He looked at my bag. ‘Is that a bass?’ Wide-eyed, he might have been asking if it were a mermaid, a unicorn, a pterodactyl. I told him the bass seemed to be locked in on the whitebait, so he might want to try a much smaller lure, something like a wee Toby. ‘I haven’t got one of those, I don’t think anyone on my websites mentioned them.’ I gave him a twenty gramme silver and white job (my desert island lure) and sat down for a smoke. Third cast and his rod bowed over with those slow hefty thumps that tell you it’s a bass. It was one fat lady, maybe three-and-a-half pounds. That young chap was like the Cheshire Cat, whenever I walk past the outcrop I can still see the smile on his face.
One more caveat, people sometimes say my views are a bit tentative, that I reckon something, I believe something else, and there’s not a whole lot that I really claim to know for sure. Fair comment. And no apology. I’m not a bass after all, just a chap with a fishing rod, so no certainties from my end, just opinions and experiences. But here’s what I hope this book might do. I hope a few bass fishers – novices or old-stagers – will pick up some ideas that give them better outings and more fish, without a visit to the supermarket seafood counter, the poor-house, or the psychiatrist. Because helping someone land a decent bass, fritter away less money on tackle, or turn maddeningly grim fishing conditions into modest success, that’s what I really enjoy.
And there lies the most important advice I’d offer to any fisher. Enjoy yourself. If some of my tips sound like fun, give them a go. If others would make your sessions less satisfying, ignore them. The best bass trip isn’t the one that produces the most or the biggest fish, it’s the one that produces the biggest grin and makes you want to get back out there as soon as possible.
It was one of those nights when nobody with any sense would go bass fishing. Early April, a small tide, a bright half-moon, and just a whisper of a wave. On the other hand I was wide awake at three in the morning. I took some lugworms from the fridge and a bag of squid from the deep-freeze. (Even in rotten conditions, you never know, and the idea of running out of bait is too hideous to contemplate.)
I headed down to my nearest beach. Walking to the water I used my torch in case the tide might have exposed any new snags. Experience has taught me that I can be relied on to find obstacles on the sand, usually by landing on my skinny backside. But no unexpected rocks, what I saw was a pair of gleaming eyes, then another pair. The beach was jumping with foxes. Now I often see foxes on the rocks fishing for crabs in the pools, but here were a dozen or so just faffing about on the high water line. I took a look at the sand at my feet: some weed, the usual depressing load of plastic waste, some odds and ends of commercial netting gear, and a whole lot of squid and rotting mackerel. A fishing boat must have been spring-cleaning its holds, dumping all the rubbish onto my beach and providing the local foxes with a rather smelly all-you-can-eat buffet.
I thawed my squid, on with a juicy one and I had a fish within minutes. Sitting on my backpack-stool in the moonlight I caught nine bass in two hours. And every time I turned on my torch to release a fish I saw the flashing eyes of four or five foxes twenty-odd yards behind me, watching intently. I tried tossingthem a mangled squid, but there was no interest. I reckon they were completely full and fancied no more than a bit of light entertainment while their feast digested.
So I sat there, a smiling fisher with his posse of smiling foxes.
A word on how things are organised. My ideas about bass are in normal typeface like this: how I fish, why I think it works, the advice I’d offer on conditions, tactics, lures, flies, bait, tackle, fishing spots… I should mention that often I don’t distinguish between lure-fishing and fly-fishing. They’re both ways of catching bass that are feeding on small swimming creatures – fry, sandeels, prawns, and so on. The only differences are the rod and reel you use and your casting style; and the bass don’t care about things like that.
Let me apologise up-front for my photos. I hope each of them makes a useful point, but they certainly don’t qualify as bass fishing pin-ups. I’m too clumsy and inept to take my camera down by the water in the dark, so my pictures are of fish I’ve brought home. That’s why they all look pretty much the same. I read articles by folk described as fishing writers and photographers. I’m neither of those things, I’m afraid, just a fellow who catches quite a lot of bass and who’d like to pass on some of his ideas. By the way, all the catches in my snaps and stories were within the legal limits at the time. When I started writing this book, we were allowed to take any number of bass above an absurdly-small minimum size and at any time of year. As it goes to press, we are banned from keeping anything at all. We can only hope the future will bring a sensible framework somewhere between those extremes.
For light amusement, pointless yarns and observations are in this typeface (so you can skip over them without losing my drift). Then there’s the song quotations at the beginning of each chapter. If you’re curious you can look up the songwriters responsible at the very end of the book. They’re all songs I sing while fishing. Bass are skittish but they’re not put off by a loud, untalented warbler who couldn’t carry a tune in a paper bag. Once in a while someone suggests I should be a bass guide: ‘You catch a lot of fish, and you really like helping other people to catch, so why not?’ And here’s why not: because I can imagine nothing that would make me homicidally crazy faster. As a young man in West Africa I supplemented my modest salary by taking holiday visitors out on the rocks. I had some lovely clients, determined to enjoy themselves, interested in anything they saw, delighted with anything they caught. And I had some proper gits. If they landed a fish, this was down to their brilliance. If they didn’t, I was a shite guide. If they lost a good one by trying to horse it in too quickly, my tackle was rubbish. And worst of all, I was stuck with them. These days I can give a fellow fisher a spot of advice, a lure, or some bait, then wander off along the shore and restore my peace and quiet. But when people pay for a four hour trip, you can’t just drop them back at their cars after twenty minutes because they’re obnoxiously snotty eejits who wouldn’t catch a fish at feeding time in an aquarium. I have nothing but admiration for fishing guides, but I’ll never be one again. Too much stress, which a poster in one of my employers’ mailrooms defined as ‘an overwhelming desire to punch the nose of some moron who thoroughly deserves it.’ They had another poster which said, ‘The beatings will continue until morale improves.’ I liked that mailroom. I was on a soft sand beach at dawn when I heard a noise like a monstrous hailstorm. On with my torch, the shore was spattered with five-inch mullet. Right in the shallows two fat seals were lashing about like conger eels with kidney stones, making huge splashes to drive the mullet onto dry land. After a few minutes the seals flopped ashore and tucked in – but not before I’d filched a few live-baits. I’d love to learn how to throw a cast-net, but I reckon it would be easier to strike up a working relationship with a seal or two.68cm (nearly 8lbs) from a decently stirred-up sea in late October. The wave looked frothy enough to colour the surf, so I started out with whole squid. Result: two tiddlers. I took a closer look at the water and found it was pretty clear, so I switched to a single 4/0 jammed with ragworms. As well as this one I released a couple of three to four pounders. Then I ran out of ragworms.
Moral: if it isn’t working, change something. I reckon a good bass fisher’s always wondering what to try next. Some people explain fishing success by talking about putting in the hours. Fair game, you don’t catch bass from your sofa or your favourite bar-stool. But lots of hours fishing in the same unproductive way just lead to lots of very long disappointing trips.
CHAPTER TWO
An Approach to Bass Fishing
A change is gonna come
When I run into early morning dog-walkers down by the water they frequently wind up saying something like, ‘I should get my gear back out and have a go, but I don’t have the patience for fishing.’ Now I’m not an all-round fisher, just a bass fisher. I can’t always tell a plaice from a flounder, rays give me the creeps, and I’m scared of conger eels and weevers, even little ones. And maybe chasing some of these species takes patience, but I reckon a patient bass fisher catches as much as a cross-eyed cricketer in handcuffs. Bass fishing’s all about change, movement, experimenting, thinking. Sitting on a tackle-box watching tip-lights doesn’t do the business, at least not reliably. Determination and adaptability are a help, patience can be a handicap.
Meet a fisher with a single bass in the bag and often this is what I hear: ‘First cast, as it hit the water. Since then not a nibble.’ My own experience backs this up, bites generally come quickly or not at all. And that tells us something. It says that if you’re fishing in the right place in the right way, fish will be onto your bait or lure like a flash. Bass grow slowly, they need a lot of food to grow at all, so they don’t hang about when they find what they’re after, they latch onto it as fast as an accountant on a tax loophole or a terrier on a rat. And the flip-side’s true as well. If you aren’t having any joy, you’re in the wrong spot, you’re using the wrong fly, lure, or bait, or you’re not fishing properly for the conditions.
Have you noticed the way fishing tackle goes up in price if they can shove the word ‘bass’ into the product description? There’s a lesson for us there. So does anyone want to buy a pair of second-hand bass fishing trousers, only slightly torn; or a nineteen year-old bass car, two not very careful owners?When a bite fails to develop, people say the fish must have felt the hook. Unlikely I reckon. Bass chomp up razor and mussel shells, so their mouths can’t be very sensitive.Late July, I had a sleep-in – by my insomniac standards – only arriving at my fishing spot a little before the dawn. There was a gentle onshore breeze and the water seemed fizzy enough to stir up a few sandeels, so I clipped on a mid-sized shallow-diver and let fly. Nothing doing, so a much slower retrieve, a sandeel with a dodgy work ethic. Again not a touch, but in the half-light I noticed a swirl behind my lure. I took a thinking break and sat on a boulder while I rolled a smoke. Watching the water I saw a huge slurp, then half a dozen whitebait leapt clear of the wave. I switched to a small Toby and I was straight into the fish.
A mid-summer morning and I’m fishing over high water on a shingle beach. The shingle gives way to a bunch of lugworm beds, so I’m casting to them and letting my bait trickle along in the tide. But it’s as slow as a politician answering a straightforward question, all I’ve managed is two tiny schoolies.
Then it starts to get light, splashes right at the water’s edge. After a quick polish of my specs I realise the splashes are sandeels, and there are some healthy swirls as well. Now I used to be a fair distance runner in my day, but sprinting along a pebbly beach in trouser waders is hard work, and I’m in a muck sweat by the time I get to the car. I wipe my face and glasses, grab my lure rod, clip on a skinny plug, and have another bash at the Usain-Bolt-in-a-vat-of-treacle routine. Back at the water’s edge, scanning, walking, scanning. Then there’s a walloping boil ten yards along the beach, maybe six feet out. A gentle lobcast parallel with the wave, three or four turns of the reel, and everything goes crazy. I had four bass, the best right on four pounds, in under an hour. And I guarantee I’d have caught none of them if I’d stuck it out with the lugworms.
So a good motto for a bass fisher would be, ‘If at first you don’t succeed, don’t keep doing what you’re doing.’ Change where you’re fishing, or change how you’re fishing. People sometimes explain a blank by saying, ‘They just weren’t there today.’ Here’s another, more hard-nosed version of that statement: ‘I fished for four hours in the wrong place.’ The bass were somewhere, they hadn’t buzzed off to Ibiza for a weekend of loud music and recreational substance abuse. A less patient or more determined fisher at least would have tried to find them.
One reason so many bait-fishers don’t go searching for their bass, I think, is that they burden themselves with too much gear. Lure-fishers tend to move a lot, often their tackle’s just a rod and a knapsack. (Most of us carry more lures than we’ll ever use, but a dozen twenty gramme plugs, spoons, and plastics don’t make for a back-breaking kit-bag.) Beach-fishers on the other hand sometimes have two rods in a tripod, a box of rigs and weights to sink an ocean liner, a deck-chair, a flask of tea, cheese toasties, an umbrella, a microwave oven, a television set, and a Sky antenna dish. Or maybe not quite, but you get my point. By the time you’ve humped that lot along the beach and set up your Mount Everest base camp, you’re not going anywhere, you’re going to wait for the action to come to you. And that’s not a great way to fish for bass. Myself, I hit the beach with more clobber than I used to and more than I’d like to. I carry a fair-sized backpack. There’s not much in it, just a spare spool, a few hooks, some mono, a winder of ready-tied rigs, and a fleece. But the canny thing is that my pack doubles as a little stool, and my gammy leg means misery if I can’t sit down. I also carry a sand-spike, not to hold the rod while I fish, but to lean it against while I bait up, change my weight or hook, roll a ciggie, or answer a call of nature. I suppose I could dump it, but I doubt I ever will.
Once I had to wade into a brutal surf to pull out an eejit who was drowning. My spike was my wading staff, and I have no doubt but that it saved two lives that day, one of them my own. So the sand-spike stays. Besides the bag and the spike I carry one rod, an eleven and a half footer that’s light and easy in the hand. Bunking a mile down the beach to find a better wave isn’t a problem. In the words of Pete Townsend, ‘I’m mobile’ (Going Mobile, Track Records, 1971). Roger Daltrey’s a trout-fisher by the way, I’m sure he travels light as well.
In the USA I understand the Coast Guard charges fees to people who need to be rescued. It seems like a good idea to me, and something the RNLI should consider, with the tariff on a sliding scale based on the level of stupidity of the folk who call them out. Bad luck or sudden change in the weather: free. Putting to sea in an unreliable boat: five hundred quid. Being cut off by a rising tide: two grand. Jumping off a pier: your wetsuit, car, and house.I was plugging in a cove on the north coast when I saw a crippled seagull. It was paddling through the wave about thirty feet from shore, trailing a broken wing and squealing. I thought the decent thing would be to end its suffering, so I tried to drag it in. My first fling was way off the mark, the lure caught by the breeze, so I switched to a wedge. As I was about to cast I saw a triangular fin, then a swirling splash and the gull was gone. Porbeagle ten yards from my boots. On another trip to the same cove I saw another porbeagle, this one just finning through the ripple, and again only thirty-odd feet away. Maybe someone should try tying a seagull fly.Some tackle is designed to catch fish, but product developers find it easier to run focus groups with fishers – and we’ll buy almost anything.We’d just had the first proper autumn hoolie, the surf was a pleasure, busy and foamy. But a blow after a calm often stirs up a slew of weed, and this one fit the bill to perfection. First cast, a dogged fight, and in came about twenty pounds of the vegetarian catch-of-the-day. I nipped off the hook-length, shouldered my bag, and set off along the beach. Every fifty-odd yards I chucked my weight into the waves to see if it would come back with a lump of wrack. On the sixth or seventh stop I was clear, so back to a proper rig, on with a whole squid, and in business.
Physical mobility’s one thing. Just as important, a bass fisher needs to be flexible. Not in the yoga sense thank goodness, or my creaky joints would have me miles up the creek: I mean flexible about how to fish. If your casts aren’t getting bites, try a different range. If your fly, lure, or bait’s being ignored, use something else. And we all struggle with this because most fishers have our favourite approaches, usually ones that have done the job in the past. I know I fall into the trap. In a stirred-up sea I love a whole squid, and I sometimes stay with it longer than I should. Why? Because a lot of my better bass (over about eight pounds) have been on squid. In a millpond calm I’m addicted to a twenty gramme silver and white Toby or a white muddler minnow, because the little beauties have saved more blanks than anything else in my boxes. Along with my beloved woolly hat these things are my good luck charms. But to be a better fisher I ought to be less of a superstitious twit. I need to give the squid, Toby, or muddler its fifteen minutes of fame, and that’s all. If it doesn’t come up with the goods, I should drop it like a bad habit and try something else.
Another thing that’s easy to do on unthinking auto-pilot is cranking a lure. My default setting’s a brisk turn of the reel-handle every second or so, giving a slightly bouncy retrieve with a slinky ska rhythm. And it works pretty well – sometimes. When it doesn’t deliver, I can be tempted to clip on something new or make a move. But before I do that I try to be firm with myself. Dump the Desmond Dekker beat and try a faster winding rate (the Buzzcocks), or a slower one (Percy Sledge). Often I find the same lure, fished differently, will turn up trumps; often but not always.
It was late May and the plugging had been good for a week. On every rising tide the cove had been filling up with finger mullet, followed by bass gorging on them. I’d taken a few home and their bellies had been stuffed with mullet to the point where I wondered they still were swimming, never mind feeding. A silver and black jointed plug, fished really slowly, seemed to drive them crazy. But not this time. About one cast in three got me a follow, but nothing was hitting the lure. OK, I thought, maybe early whitebait, on with a little Toby. Same story, follows but no pulls. A faster retrieve, then a slower retrieve, no difference. Got it, must be jelly-fry, time for a wee fly on a dropper. Follows, no pulls. In the end I decided to try everything in my box, every hard bait, every plastic. It was the eleventh and final lure that started me catching. I saved it till last because it’s the goofiest piece of shite I ever saw, about six inches long, two semicircle hooks, fluorescent pink and yellow. I found it on a reef on a low spring tide. It had a Japanese name, so I reckoned it was an expensive number, but in the water I thought it looked aboutas appetising as a dog turd in a soup bowl. The fish disagreed, they absolutely loved it. I released five bass, then stuck one in the bag and went home. I cleaned my fish right away, expecting to find it had been feeding on something weird and exotic, maybe something pink and yellow. And its stomach was jam-packed with … finger mullet. Not for want of trying but that lure has never caught another bass.
One more thing, fish when the bass are active, not just when the weather’s good and there’s nothing much on the television. As a rule I find sunny day trips are a complete waste of time. I may see a few fish, I may even catch a few tiddlers, but the bigger bass don’t show up often in conditions that call for sunscreen, flash dark glasses, and baseball caps with tackle company logos. Evenings-into-nights are good, and I reckon the sport picks up properly about an hour after dark. But I’d say the best time of all – with bait, fly, or lures – is the early morning, from a couple of hours before dawn through to the first rays of sun on the water. Bass feed all through the night, but they seem to feed hardest as it’s coming to an end. Back a few years, the pubs used to shut at half-ten, and the bartender would shout ‘Last orders’ at ten-fifteen. That was when the serious boozers would chug like mad to get a couple more pints in before chucking-out time. I believe the end of the night works like last orders for bass, they have one final eating binge, filling their tummies while the going’s still good.
Of course some fishers hate early starts, and I suppose they should stick to evenings – after all, fishing’s supposed to be a pleasure, not a way of turning your alarm-clock into an instrument of torture. But even if you’re an evening type, if you’re not too chuffed with your catches, be flexible. Try staying later, starting earlier, just try something new.
And that’s the approach. Don’t be patient, be determined. If you’re not catching, be ready to move to a different spot, to try another time or lure or retrieve or bait, to switch around almost anything. Watching a tip-light and hoping for a change of luck isn’t real bass fishing. The old IBM slogan – ‘Think’ – is good advice. Unless the rod’s bent all the time, think – where to go next, what change of bait might do the trick, what lure or fly. Or as Albert Einstein put it, ‘Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.’ Wikipedia doesn’t mention Albert as a bass fisher, but I’m sure he was. His hair, the only way you get hair like that is by standing on a beach in a gale.
