IT PAYS TO BE BORING
What to look for and what to avoid when finding a new mark
How to find the best bass venues.
Most anglers are adventurers with wanderlust in their hearts, and itchy feet in their waders. They dream of cod in Norway, salmon in Russia, marlin in Australia – or at least a few chucks from that headland they see through the car window when they’re stuck in traffic.
I’m the opposite. The only time my feet itch is when there’s seaweed in my socks. Although I fish several times a week, I never wet a line outside west Cornwall, and I’ve less than a dozen regular haunts, all within 15 miles of my front door.
I’d love to claim this was down to environmental responsibility and a refusal to add food miles to my bass suppers, but the real reason is that they’re places I know well. I hardly need to think about where to try my first cast or what lure or bait to use. Those decisions come naturally, straight from memory.
It’s not just my fishing life that’s governed by habit. If truth be told, I’m set in my ways, even boring. I worked for a year in a company where our lunch was brought into the office every day. After the first week the receptionist stopped taking my order because it never varied: tuna on brown bread with extra lettuce and onion, five times a week for 12 months. What can I say? I like tuna and I didn’t want to waste scarce brain cells wondering whether I felt like a Greek salad or a cheese roll.
In the same way, I hate standing on the shore and thinking about where to start or if to use a weightless soft plastic, a shad or shallow diver, or squid versus razor. Familiar spots let me start fishing right away.
In ideal conditions – a big tide and a respectable wave – you’ve a chance of a good bass almost anywhere. When things are more challenging and I feel the need for a new mark, what do I look for?
AVOID CROWDS
First, let me say what I avoid – and that’s the place with a big reputation, the beach that crops up in catch reports all the time, the cove that tackle dealers routinely recommend to visitors. Mostly, this is because I don’t enjoy fishing in a crowd, which I define as more than three rods per mile of coastline. I’m antisocial as well as boring.
There’s a practical problem with popular marks too, the headlamp. Some anglers are disciplined, they switch on their lights when they’re changing a rig or a bait, and dowse them the rest of the time. But a lot wander around, in and out of the water, their foreheads glaring as if they were in a ‘Dad’s Army’ U-boat patrol. In a small wave particularly, a bright light puts the bass off the feed.
Even worse, when a spot is talked up on the anglers’ network, it comes to the notice of bandits who set nets illegally, use microscopic mesh, and flog undersized catches to tightwad restaurant owners who serve cheap fish suppers
with a side order of employee exploitation. Scummy netters can massacre a whole stretch of coastline in a single night.
Well-frequented places attract some so-called anglers who chuck their rubbish on the shore. My blood boils when I run into bait wrappers, lure packages, tangles of line, and empty beer tins. I think, “You’re perfectly capable of tramping a mile in soft sand with a tackle box on your back or scrambling down rocks like Vaseline-coated ski slopes, but you’re too idle to take your junk to the bin. You ought to be made to come back, pick up the stuff you left behind, and eat it with a knife and fork – in front of a live-streaming camera under the supervision of Greta Thunberg and the Marine Conservation Society.” I’m often grumpy, it is age-related, but I try not to make myself any grumpier than necessary.
THINK SHALLOW
Another reason I prefer to be far from the madding crowd is that areas generally are busy when they provide lots of bites. It’s not that I love to stand around in all weathers without being disturbed by feeding fish. I don’t go home at the end of a session soaking wet and saying: “Not a nibble, that was brilliant”. Boring, antisocial and grumpy I may be, but I’m not crazy.
It’s just that when takes are non-stop, often they’re from tiddlers – whiting, little flatties, baby pollack, and schoolies. I would rather have slower sport if it means the chance of bigger bass.
Lastly – and this is where I crossover from what I hate to what I love – most anglers favour deep water: beaches that shelve steeply, rock marks where the sea floor drops away into a dark abyss. I attribute this to Jules Verne, or maybe to the ‘Jaws’ films.
The sea monsters were 20,000 leagues under the sea, the gigantic shark broaches from a bottomless expanse of ocean. Okay, so the said shark looked like something cobbled together by a distracted four-yearold with an inadequate supply of Lego bricks, but it comes from full fathom five as it hunts down swimmers, charter boats, and their raving skippers.
While there are fish that hang out a long way below the surface – big pollack and congers come to mind – inshore bass feed in the shallows. When there’s just enough water to cover their backs, they can catch their meals without wasting energy. A sandeel or a mullet in two feet of fizzy wave has very few escape routes: starboard, port or hard astern. It can’t go full ahead without ending up on dry land, and a dive has it bashing its nose on the seabed. It’s cornered with nowhere to run, a perfect snack for a bass with an appetite.
By the same token, dead or beaten up worms, crabs, squid and shellfish wash around in the surf; and like seaweed and plastic waste, they are most concentrated where it is just inches deep.
THE WEATHER
My next comment is so obvious that I almost hesitate to mention it. It’s not go somewhere wet, but it’s only a whisker more subtle: look for onshore weather.
The treats bass eat – and that covers everything from tiny weed maggots and jellyfry to mackerel and squid – are thickest on the ground and easiest to grab when there’s a stir-up. Little fish and prawns are swept around the rocks and reefs by a bubbly wave. Crabs, clams, worms, mussels and larger fish are pushed on to the beaches by a roaring surf.
A sheltered mark may be comfortable – you can put up your little bivvy and stay toasty and dry – but you’ll catch more bass with the wind in your teeth. And if you want a life of luxury, you’re best off lighting the sitting room fire and pouring a dram. Horizontal rain in your face won’t do you any harm. As my old aunt always said: “You may be sweet, but you’re not made of sugar; you won’t melt.”
If there’s no breeze I look for anything else that’ll move the water around and produce some disturbances. The mouths of rivers and streams can deliver. Some bays and most harbours drain through narrow openings on the ebb, and long, exposed beaches often have healthy cross-flows to wallop things about.
ROUGH GROUND
There is something else I love in a fishing spot that a lot of my fellow anglers avoid like the plague. Having owned up to being boring, antisocial and grumpy, I can add that I’m annoyingly perverse because I like snags. When I fish the fly or a lure, I’m most confident if the water is full of lumps and bumps, outcrops and boulders. They break up the wave and the pull of the tide, creating swirls and eddies, which, in turn, swipe the baitfish around, making them easier for bass to hunt down.
I understand people who prefer a clean seabed because some of them are clipping on lures that cost more than my first two cars added together. I wouldn’t be too chuffed to leave twenty-something quid’s worth of Japanese design stuck fast to an underwater obstruction. I rarely use expensive plugs, the few I own are harvested from reefs on low spring tides. I don’t mind taking my chances with a soft plastic, a shad, a Toby, or something I salvaged at a cost of zero – unless you put a price on the time spent emptying saltwater from my trouser waders.
When I use bait, I’m happy to see some junk in the surf as well. It’s not that I enjoy hauling in pound after pound of the vegetarian catch of the day, but where weed and waste plastic wash in, so do other bits and pieces that appeal to a scavenging whopper. If I see tangles of wrack and netting on the sand, it’s a fair bet the wave and tide are working together to dump a bass feast into the shallows. Where their meals are abundant, that’s where the better fish will be on the feed.