BANKER VENUES

Places where you can catch an early-season bass on a lure

Where to catch an early-season fish.

Attempting to catch an earlyseason bass will depend on where you live or fish. It can be achieved in March, and most certainly April, but the further south and west you live, it may even be earlier. January 2019 has already thrown up some good bass, although, arguably, these fish could be termed as very late-season stragglers.

Here, I am concentrating on where to fish, and will suggest the specific lures that I will be using.

SIGNIFICANT MOMENT

In my book ‘The Lure of The Bass’ I tell of one freezing-cold, bright and sunny day in early April when – following an extended period of cold easterly winds – I decided to go lure fishing for bass.

I arrived on the mark at dead low water, safe in the knowledge that I had three hours of fishing time until the flooding tide meant I had to wade through a sandy gully or be cut off on the shingle beach for six hours.

The terrain was quite evil – a short shingle bank that led to a reef covered in slippery green weed and sharp rocks. This was some years ago, before

I started using weightless, weedless soft plastics. I attached what is still one of my favourite early-season lures – a Tackle House Feed Shallow in the Ochiayu (brown-backed with a orange/cream belly) colour. This pattern says ‘blenny or pollack’ and that, along with its wonderful wide swimming action and shallow swimming capabilities, gave me confidence that I had the best possible imitation attached.

Five minutes after the water reached the shingle I made a cast slightly over to my right and proceeded to retrieve it. The lure came wriggling into view, but this time it was joined by an 8-9lb bass meandering about 50cm behind it. It was by far the largest bass I’d witnessed at this time and it was about to grab my lure – or was it? It made a leisurely turn about a metre off the rod tip before continuing in a wide arc and snaking back into the cover of the reef.

I didn’t catch that bass, but it wasn’t important because it was the significance of the event that allowed me to place an important piece into that bass jigsaw puzzle – that a very large and mature bass had the confidence to be hunting in these weather conditions that early in the season, when the sea temperature was well down in such shallow water. It told me a number of things.

First, it didn’t feel threatened and was very likely to be the number one predator in residence at the time. Second, I imagine it was probably a loner moving around the coastline to its own timetable. Third, it was expecting to find a meal for its efforts in that rugged, remote cove.

If there is one type of ‘open coast’ venue where you can really increase your odds it is somewhere very remote, where there is lots of cover and where lots of critters are hiding within. Lure-wise, the Feed Shallow alongside my armoury of weightless, weedless soft plastics and the Apia Alied’Ore 115F in the Bora pattern (representing a baby mullet) will form my initial

attack on these venues.