BASS DETECTIVE
Become a super sleuth to find the hotspots on a beach when lure fishing for bass
Be a super sleuth and find the hotspots.
Many moons ago when an addiction to bass lure fishing wasn’t even an issue for me, I headed to Namibia in Africa in an attempt to catch a big bronze whaler shark from the beach. I was so excited I never slept a wink on the flight over, and by the time I was standing on the Skeleton Coast with a 14ft beachcaster cradled in my shaking hands, I was a nervous wreck.
I will never forget that adrenaline rush and then the long fight with my first shark hooked from a beach. My fishing life was never going to be the same afterwards.
At the time I was completely into bait fishing, usually from the rocks and reefs and manmade structures. Fishing from sandy beaches didn’t really enter into the equation. After the first couple of days in Namibia, when I had managed to calm my nerves at actually living a dream, I began to notice how our outstanding guide Terence Clark would be driving his 4x4 along those many miles of wild African beaches, eyes glued mainly to the sea, and then he would suddenly stop and announce that we were going to have a go for sharks or spotties or kob or steenbras and so on.
How on earth did he know where to stop? To me, it looked like the same sort of beach stretching hundreds of miles ahead of us.
I did what I would hope all anglers do when they don’t know something. I started asking Terence a lot of questions. I wanted to understand what our guide was looking for when his eyes were roaming back and forth over the cold Atlantic ocean that was crashing into the hot sand of the oldest desert in the world. Over time and multiple trips to Namibia, Terence continued to teach me how to, essentially, read a beach.
By looking at the shape of the waves and how the water moved, he showed me how I could determine what was underneath the surface in terms of sandbanks, holes, gullies, tide rips, and so on.
FEATURES AND CURRENT
What we look for with our bass fishing are features and/or current. An open surf beach might look like nothing more than a mass of white tumbling water, but think about how the waves break on a shoreline and how subtle changes in depth alter the shape of those waves and where the water can go.
The signs are relatively obvious when your eyes become better accustomed to what’s going on. Remember that we are not looking for great big drop-offs and so on here. Indeed, it can be very subtle changes in the topography of the beach that bring the bass close in to feed.
I now fish more and more open beaches for bass, and especially when there is a decent bit of surf running. Go back to those glorious old black and white photos of the early days of bait surf fishing for bass on, say, the wild Atlantic beaches of the west coast of Ireland, and you will notice that, for the most part, there is at least some kind of surf running.
Without a doubt those anglers are standing where they are because they have read the beach and are putting their baits into specific spots, and it is no different with lure fishing.
I accept it is easier to read a typical surf beach than somewhere much deeper and more steeply shelving, like Chesil Beach in Dorset. Even on that massive shingle beach, I know of many bass anglers walking along and looking for subtle current changes and so. This is where they will often cast their lures because this tends to be where the bait shoals hang around.
LOOK FOR VARIATION
I would urge you not to simply walk on to a beach and randomly chuck a lure out without giving any thought to where the bass might be. If you are lucky enough to be able to examine the beach from an elevated position, then so much the better, otherwise you can simply walk along the sand and keep a close eye on how the waves are breaking and how this helps show us what is going on under the surface.
Look at my friend Mark Quinton fishing the surf (pictured below) and, at first glance, you might just think he is fishing some nondescript bit of Cornish beach with a few gentle waves breaking that he hopes might hold a few bass.
Now pull back a bit (pictured above) and look closely at where Mark is standing. Beyond him and also slightly back and to his right is fizzy but uniform-looking white water where plenty of waves are breaking. Why are they breaking so uniformly? Because they are washing over shallow water.
Now look at what is right in front of Mark and you can see water that just looks different to the rest. There are no waves breaking and a very distinct difference between the water washing over the flatter terrain. Why? Because some slightly deeper water is breaking up the shape of the waves, which means it’s slightly deeper in front of Mark – and this is the sort of feature we are looking for.
The water hits the beach and has to go somewhere, and because there is a gully in front of Mark, the water needs to exit somewhere and it is running fairly hard from left to right. We both pulled a nice bass from this gully by doing nothing more than casting and gently twitching a six-inch soft plastic OSP DoLive Stick (pictured above right) rigged weedless and weightless on a size 5/0 hook across that gully, and used the tide rip/current to swing the lure through on a left to right arc.
To be fair, we had some perfect conditions that morning, and reading the beach was not hard at all. That gully stood out like a beacon among the gentle waves breaking along the shore.
SMALL CHANGES
There are plenty of times when you might choose to fish a surf beach when conditions are really pounding in and, at first glance, everything looks like a seething maelstrom and you can’t work out where to fish.
Again, I would urge you not to rush in and chuck your lures out as far as you can, because if the conditions are fishable, then I assure you that you can still read the beach and find some features to concentrate on. Things might not be as obvious as on a calmer day, but a good exercise in learning to read beaches is to go for a dog walk on a surf beach at low tide and look closely at the topography.
You are not going to see huge holes and gullies and sandbanks, but moving water doesn’t need much of a change in topography to then behave slightly differently. Bass don’t need much of a change to hunt their prey, which in turn might be looking for cover from predators. What might look to us like a fairly insignificant rise in the sand is actually a fundamental change in how the water moves around and over it. Sometimes the signs are
incredibly obvious, but at other times you need to stand back and watch, and look for waves that might be breaking a bit differently to the rest, and so on.
BIRD WATCHING
Another good way to put yourself in the right spot is to look for bird activity. I am talking mainly about terns, gannets and cormorants and how, if they are feeding close to shore, it means there is some kind of food source that has brought them in.
Smaller baitfish often mean predatory fish like bass are also drawn to the activity, so keep a lookout for what the birds are doing. My friend John Quinlan, over in Ireland, has had some epic surf fishing for bass after spotting a tern or two swooping down and picking off sandeels. He has moved his clients to where the birds were feeding and they often find the bass on simple metal lures.
The signs are many and varied, but if you go fishing with your eyes wide open your chances of connecting with bass on what can sometimes be a vast stretch of golden sand are vastly improved. ■