I KNEW I’D CATCH MORE BASS
In his inimitable style, Leakyboots offers some sage advice for catching bass when you think conditions are rubbish
Sage advice for when fishing looks rubbish.
When it comes to the weather forecast, bass enthusiasts are compulsive viewers. I’m no passive couch potato either because I behave like a parliamentary backbencher or an excitable football fan. I jump up and bellow with delight or shake my fist and bray incoherent insults at the screen.
A light-to-moderate onshore breeze has me cheering as I start to sort through my fly-box or lure bag. The start or end of a big blow off the Atlantic prompts a smiling rummage through the freezer for squid, mackerel or razor clams.
What, however, do we do when the experts promise conditions which, in the nontechnical meteorological jargon can only be described as rubbish? There’s a bumpersticker that says “When the going gets tough, the tough go shopping”. That’s not without a grain of truth. I follow a couple of angling sites online, if it’s flat calm or utterly wild there are a lot of posts about what reel or lure to buy next, but not many about fishing trips.
I live in Cornwall, half-a-mile from the sea, and since retiring I can pick and choose when to head down to the water. But my late unlamented job involved travel, much of it being long distance. When I was home I fitted in as many outings as I could.
No matter how hopeless it looked, I knew I’d catch more bass from the shore on a dire morning than from an airport lounge or a grim corporate meeting room in Manchester, Munich or Montreal. As a result, I found ways to winkle out the occasional decent fish, even
when my fellows of the angle were certain I was urinating in the wind.
CALL OF THE WILD
Now wind, that’s a good place to start. A lot of bass-seekers avoid a real howler. I hardly ever see another rod once the gusts are over about 30 knots. Maybe there are pubs where the price of beer drops with the barometric pressure, maybe people don’t appreciate the exfoliating effect of being sand-blasted by flying bits of beach, I don’t know. I love a wild spell…with a few caveats, of course.
When the squalls hit 50-odd miles per hour, my woolly hat, sand-spike and kitbag gallop up the shingle, and I have to keep running after them. At my age that’s no fun. And a big wave limits me to beach fishing. I see younger types casting lures from the rocks on hairy days, but I’m not tempted to join them. Firstly because plugs that fly into the teeth of a gale sometimes fly back almost as swiftly.
Hospital casualty staff know how to remove hooks from patients’ ears, but they have more important things to do.
More serious is the risk of being swept away by the swell; we lose anglers every year. Always wear a lifejacket. Some people believe good swimming skills and a mobile telephone are enough to keep them safe. I beg to differ. Try doing the freestyle medley after a 10ft wave’s bashed your head against a boulder. See if there’s a cellular signal under the water off your favourite headland.
Even on a gently sloping strand it pays to take care, to set up well back from the edge and to keep your wits about you. But the
sport can be as crazy as the surf. I can’t make much of a cast in what feels like a wind tunnel for Formula One cars, but, in a hoolie, bass feed surprisingly close in, rarely more than 25 yards from dry land, so that’s where I focus.
The other trick is to use a big bait, something with juice and aroma. A boiling wave means coloured water, and the fish struggle to find a sandeel or a bunch of ragworms in stuff that looks like violently agitated mushroom soup. Squid and razor clam, a whole 9in or 10in squid or a tangle of clams as big as a jumbo sausage from the chip shop are more productive.
One advantage of a surf that looks as if Father Neptune’s dropped his cocktail shaker is the bass are bigger. Maybe the fast-biting schoolies aren’t around, so the whoppers have more time to find the bait. I’ll take it either way, I try never to miss a good stir-up.
A few years ago I was driving to a nearby beach at four o’clock on a gale-battered October morning when a boyish policeman pulled me over. My car was full of tackle, I had half-a-dozen calamari in my pocket, but the constable refused to believe I was going fishing. “Nobody’s that daft,” he observed and made me take a breathalyser test. Then he wrote down my name and address. He asked me to show that my light bulbs were in working order. Finally, he checked the tread on all four tyres. When at last he let me back on my way I had two bites in half-an-hour, two fish, one of about 5lb, the other 9lb 8oz. Maybe not so daft, young man.
CLOSE ENCOUNTERS
Then there’s calm weather. Forty-something years ago I knew the bailiff on a spate river in the north of Scotland. When it was hot, dry and still, he’d mop his brow and say “Terrible weather for folk.” A long pause. “Good for the tourists though.”
Quite right. When the holidaymakers are smiling as they turn pillar-box red on our beaches, the folk who love their bass often struggle to find the right postcode for the fish. In a fizzy wave bass hunt through the disturbances, spots where their prey gets stirred up and concentrated by the swirls. They’re inefficient converters of protein, and they need as much nourishment as possible, captured with the minimum of effort. A shoal of whitebait or sandeels in a ripping undertow, or worms and clams washing around in a foamy breaker are easy pickings.
Fast-moving water is like a motorway service station where you can eat a pizza just paces from the burger bar and the ice cream counter, but where’s the high calorie convenience food buffet in a flat sea? It looks like the motorway itself, a uniform surface stretching all the way from your boots to the horizon. You would think the fish might be anywhere, spread thinly through the whole ocean. But there are likely feeding spots even if there is hardly a ripple. When they’re chasing tiddlers, bass hang about in areas where they can corner their prey. When they’re scavenging worms and shellfish they go where stuff builds up against a barrier. In either case this means trying really close in, where the shoreline stops mullet or mackerel from escaping, and where it collects edible bits and pieces as they drift. I always fish a short line, but in still water I take it to extremes, just a couple of rodlengths out. With lures or a fly, I cast nearly parallel to the water’s edge. With bait I let my tackle drift around until it’s almost on dry land. Passers-by sometimes ask what I’m playing at: “Fish live in water, you know, they’re not amphibians.” But if you peer through the limpid shallows you may be surprised what you see. Of course, there are the usual bits of weed, the depressing plastic water bottles and tangles of netting, but bass can cruise so close in that their dorsal fins cut the surface, where the water’s thin enough that a tail flick stirs up a puff of sediment from the bottom.
Key to making decent catches in a flat sea is stealth. When fish are right up against the rocks or the beach they scarper at the least disturbance and at any unfamiliar presence.
I run into keen types creeping about in head-to-toe camouflage kit, but I don’t go
“I think the people who look like snipers in the jungle probably just enjoy dressing up. They’d be every bit as happy in a cowboy hat, a Marie Antoinette bustle, or the front
half of a pantomime horse”
that far myself. Most army surplus gear’s brown, green, and khaki, it doesn’t exactly disappear into a background of sand or granite. In fact, I think the people who look like snipers in the jungle probably just enjoy dressing up. They’d be every bit as happy in a cowboy hat, a Marie Antoinette bustle, or the front half of a pantomime horse.
SIMPLE APPROACH
At the other end of the scale are the bods who stomp purposefully down the shore and through the shallows, pausing only when they’re nipple-deep in the briny.
A good idea if you’re hoping to scoop up a bass in your chesties or kick it with your boots, not so clever if you want to catch it on your hook.
My approach is somewhere in the middle, and it’s pretty straightforward. First, most of my outings are before sunrise. When it’s dark as a bag it doesn’t matter whether I’m wearing military fatigues, top hat and tails, or a Boratstyle mankini, I’m hard to spot anyway.
If there’s a moon, or as the first hint of dawn pales the sky, I try to make sure I’m not backlit by the glow. I often head home before the self-styled early risers arrive on the mark. Second, and most importantly, I stay away from the area I’m fishing.
With artificials, I cast along the shoreline, my lure or fly landing 20-odd yards from my body, but still in the shallows at the water’s edge. With bait I stay at least 30ft up the beach, except when I’m landing something.
Third, I avoid pointing light at the sea. Bass don’t appreciate a Pink Floyd style display of flashing and dancing beams. And fourth, I go with tackle that doesn’t splash too much. To my eye, a big popper looks ostentatiously silly in a glassy sea, like a stretch limousine on a Cornish back lane, whereas a weightless soft plastic or a muddler minnow plops softly and seductively into the ripple.
Equally, a 4oz lead weight hits the water with all the subtle artistry of an uncoordinated diver belly-flopping from a 10-metre board. So typically, I use no sinker at all, just a bait like squid or mackerel head, something lumpy enough to chuck out under its own steam. If there’s any current, the weightless approach also lets my tempting treat roll along the bottom, holding briefly in the scours and potholes where flotsam and food pile up.
DEFINITION OF INSANITY
One late August morning I woke before three and took a cup of coffee into the garden. Our promised westerly blow was missing in action, not a breath of wind. I had some joey mackerel in the fridge from the day before, I’d smoked half-a-dozen fat ones and kept the babies for bait. I went down to a nearby beach with the tide at half and rising.
There were three chaps already set up on the sand, but they didn’t look like bass fishers. They had six big rods in tripods, there was a brilliantly gleaming lantern in the middle of their encampment and a permanently lit headlamp on each of their noggins. They were wading up to their middles, then flinging their weights way into the gloom. I asked if they were doing any good. “Just a few baby flounders. But the bass are out there. In calm conditions they always go on ragworms and they always feed about a 150 yards out.”
I didn’t bother suggesting a different approach. Anyone who says the fish “always” do anything is beyond reason, as delusional as a politician touting a new tax policy or a nutritionist who says pomegranates cure pink-eye, pertussis, and piles. The only absolute around bass is that there are no absolutes, they rarely fail to surprise.
I walked to the end of the strand, as far as possible from the human searchlights and their repeated route marches into the Atlantic. I stood 10 paces back from the water and tossed my mackerel into the shallows. There was enough tide to trundle it along the seabed, so I shuffled slowly in pursuit. Then I felt a single thump, followed by slack line; a three-pounder, which I released.
I put on a second bait. Before lobbing it out I paused for a ciggie, just to let things settle down after the disturbance of beaching my fish. Twenty minutes later I repeated the process with a seven-pounder. On the way back to the car I was stopped by the wellilluminated lads. Where, how, what bait? I told them, showed them my rig with its mangled mackerel, offered them my leftover joeys. No takers, they were sticking with ragworms at distance. I can’t imagine why.
When Albert Einstein mentioned “doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results” it wasn’t advice, it was his definition of insanity. ■