USE YOUR SENSES
Don’t miss what’s happening as you fish.
Often, I’m bemused by young people, particularly the ones who sit around a table without speaking as they send each other messages on their telephones. Their faces betray interest, they smile and frown. But they’re silent, conversation limited to the rapid twitching of their thumbs.
Equally, I’m surprised when I look at a bass fishing forum and find someone’s posting live updates from a beach or a rock mark. Here you are, I think, spending time by the water, but all you can see is a small lump of rectangular plastic and all you can feel is an annoyingly miniaturised keypad. You might as well be in an office, where at least you’d be staring at a sensibly sized screen and stabbing at a proper keyboard.
What’s more, and much more important, if you were to put your mobile device back in your pocket, you would catch more bass – because you’d be able to pay attention, to use your senses.
TOUCH
First, your sense of touch. You could hold your rod. I run into quite a few anglers whose idea of bass fishing is to tie on a breakout weight, sling out a bait, then place their outfit on to a tripod. I chat with anyone I meet on the shore, in the unsocial hours before the dawn there aren’t many of us about, it would be ill-mannered not to stop for a yarn.
If you use a rest I’ll take any advice you might offer with a generous pinch of salt, pepper, and scotch bonnet chillies. You may be a wise and skilful all-round beach expert, but you aren’t any sort of a bass-fisher. Real bass-nuts keep our rods in our hands, except when we’re unhooking a fish, changing a bait, eating a squid-smeared sandwich, or answering a call of nature.
For one thing, this means we don’t need to rely on wired sinkers. Unless the surf’s walloping about like a washing machine on the remove-rancid-squid cycle, I stick to a bomb weight and use one that’s not quite heavy enough to hold bottom. That way my bait trickles around on the sea floor, finding its way into the channels and depressions in the sand.
Walk most beaches at low tide and you’ll see plenty of these scours and dimples, and they’re the places where bits and pieces end up: weed and rubbish, but also dead fish, worms, crabs and shells. This makes them happy hunting grounds for scavenging bass – little transport cafés across the otherwise barren carriageway of the sea floor.
If it’s too calm for the surf and tide to move my gear into the magic spots, I twitch it along. I cast, wait a few minutes, wind in a few yards, repeat the prescription until
“Weirdly, a great many bass-fishers really don’t see much of what’s going on around them”
the swivel almost hits the tip-ring – and stay alert all the way.
Some people hold their rods because they say bites are quick and hard to detect. That’s not my experience. Baby conger eels take softly, whiting can be rapid bait pinchers, but I find most bass take with a no-nonsense thump or a few yards of slack line. Either way, if you want your gear to wander through the wave, pausing in the potholes where food and feeding fish hang out, you have to use your sense of touch.
SIGHT
Then there’s sight. Weirdly, a great many bass-fishers really don’t see much of what’s going on around them. I’ve mentioned the ones who peer at their mobiles, but they’re not alone. Some bait merchants – mostly the ones with tripods – squint non-stop at their tip-lights. Fly-casters watch the ends of their lines, lure fans focus on the square yard of water behind their poppers, swimmers or soft plastics.
Nobody wants to miss that magic moment when the rod hoops over or the water erupts in a mighty swirl behind the fly or the plug. Instead, they miss the clues that might tell them where and how they should be fishing. For instance, one July morning I was wandering along a run of little coves casting a skinny shallow diving plug into the rips and undertows. I was trying to suggest a wave-battered sandeel in the shallows where I thought the bass would be feeding.
As the dawn began to glimmer, I spotted a whirling knot of seagulls a couple of hundred yards out. Slowly, they drew closer as they took it in turns to dive headlong into the drink. When they were a couple of cricket pitches away, one crashed into the water, emerged with a flopping silvery tiddler in its beak, and flew straight over my head.
Of course, it emptied its bowels, but I side-stepped like an international fly-half – well, more like an innately uncoordinated flanker who turned out for the village third fifteen 50-odd years ago when none of the regular players showed up. Well, I was wearing trouser waders on slippery boulders, allowances must be made. In any event, the toxic poo-bomb missed me by a couple of feet.
I kept the bird in view, its takeaway breakfast looked like a whitebait, so I switched to a small Toby and hurled it through the disturbed area. Two bass and a sea-trout in half-a-dozen casts. Then the shoal moved away.
Another early morning, this time in September, I was lobbing mackerel baits 30-odd yards into a four-feet chop when I noticed a boil not far from my boots. It’s easy to imagine things in the low light of a remote beach: the old salts reported mermaids and ghostly pirate ships, I sometimes have hallucinations of steaming hot pasties.
I wiped the salt spray and wet sand from my glasses and scanned the moonlit surf-table carefully back and forth.
No optical illusion, the shallows were speckled with eddies and there were dorsal fins slicing through the surface. I reeled in until my gear was almost on the beach, stopped, and within minutes I felt an aggressive pull. It was a 6lb bass, followed by two more, all from within rodlengths of the shore.
Keep your eyes peeled and you pick up all sorts of bassy evidence: cormorants duckdiving and surfacing with smug looks and beaks full of baitfish, finger mullet splashing, sandeels and jelly-fry flipping, squid or razors washing in, prawns making little rings and spits. Even seals, which most anglers view as session-killers, can show you where you should be casting; they’re brilliant at finding concentrations of food.
HEARING
three or four
Next there’s hearing. In calm conditions feeding bass slurp loudly enough to be picked up by anyone, except the bod with headphones, the one listening to the football scores, gangster rap, or a friend’s biteby-bite commentary on some 4G gizmo.
What a waste. Casting a fly or lure to a seen fish is exciting. Aiming in darkness at the sound of a sucking boil is nothing short of heart-stopping.
It isn’t just bass that make tell-tale noises. One autumn morning, an hour before first light, I was fishing squid baits in a building wave when the strand came alive with a hideous racket, something like a debate in the House of Commons or a narky football crowd in an outbreak of infective laryngitis.
Fifty yards to my right the sand was jumping with crows and seagulls flapping and squawking for all they were worth. I wandered along for a closer look. The shore was littered with undersized mackerel interspersed with a few scad and garfish. A boat must have dumped its by-catch on the way back to harbour, the birds were doing a selective beach clean. I stuffed a few joeys in my pocket – that’s why my fishing jacket has a distinctive aroma – and tied one on in place of my squid. I caught three bass before sunrise, the smallest a four-pounder.
James Batty is the author of ‘The Song of a Solitary Bass Fisher’, published by Merlin Unwin Books, price £14.99