FINDING THE FOOD TABLE
Using the correct bait, lure or fly is only half of the story for bass success. The other is knowing where to fish…
Know where to find bass.
A I kindly soul, I’m not giving anyone an Ordnance Survey map with my bass hot spots highlighted in magic marker. This is mostly because coves and beaches that develop a reputation on the grapevine attract interest from those who set illegal nets too close to shore and peddle undersized fish to restaurants out of the backs of vans. erefore, my geographical advice is general.
Locating bass is actually fairly simple. Go where their food is in good supply and where the fish won’t need to work too hard for their meals. It is unfair to describe bass as lazy though, but it’s anglers who can be lazy. ey’re the ones who can’t be bothered to roll out of bed at half past daft to catch a perfect tide, or to tramp through the sand to a different spot when the first one’s not delivering.
Bass don’t roll themselves up in seaweed duvets, pretend to be asleep until their partners get up and make the tea, or anchor their bottoms to padded tackle boxes. It’s just that they’re slow growing creatures and inefficient converters of protein. ey can’t afford to swim all over the ocean in search of a mouthful. Bass need as many easy calories as possible to help them gain weight. In the wrong spot feeding can be hard work, a waste of energy.
Before I retired, my job took me round the world, and often my clients invited me to eat with them. In China this involved a group supper at a circular table. In the middle was a sort of roulette wheel with eight or more dishes. As it spun around you helped yourself and waited for the next rotation.
Now I’m okay with chopsticks, but I’m slow, and every time something appealing whizzed past I’d snatch and miss, only managing to load my plate when the wheel ground to a halt. Often I went to bed hungry.
e knack of locating feeding bass comes down to picking spots where they find it easy to fill their bellies, rather than long searches or abortive chases. Here it helps to split bass fodder into two categories – things that swim and try to escape, and those that sink and drift around on the bottom.
THE SWIMMERS
For the swimmers you want a spot where the tide, the wave and inshore structure concentrate baitfish in a small area and batter them about a bit. A decent bass can deal with a lot of turbulence, while a fry, whitebait, prawn, joey mackerel or a sandeel is swept around in a rip or an undertow, out of control and unable to escape a marauding predator.
Gaps in and between reefs or rocky outcrops are ideal feeding grounds, where baitfish are funnelled through a narrow opening and lurking hunters can swallow them as they’re pushed helpless in the current. Sometimes an obstruction in the water, a promontory or a breakwater, provides a barrier, and bass herd their prey against this blockage and chomp at their leisure.
One May morning I was on a local pier hoping for early mackerel. e water was busy with fry just over an inch long, so I used three mini sabiki lures ahead of a metal jig. In an hour I had two big mackerel for supper, six more for the smoker. Just one last cast, as most anglers say a dozen times before we really mean it. I made the first of my last casts parallel with the pier in case a fish pie sized pollack might be hanging around the snaggy weed. But not a pollack, I came up with three bass, one on each sabiki, two babies and a two-pounder.
I nipped off a couple of the sabiki and tried again. A 3lb bass, then two more little ones.
ey’d take only when my lure was hard up against the harbour wall. Watching through the clear water I could see them skulking less than six feet out, like traffic wardens waiting for an expiring parking meter, before charging into the shoals of fry as they flickered along the pier.
THE SINKERS
When it comes to stuff that sloshes about on the bottom – dead or bashed up fish, squid, crabs, razor clams, mussels, worms – there’s a simple test for a good fishing spot. Is this a place where bass treats wash ashore?
is is not hard to find out as long as you don’t mind a hike, walking along beaches and scanning the high water line for edible debris among the weed and plastic rubbish.
A good long-range indicator can be crows and seagulls on the sand. When they mill
around with the diligent air of bargain hunters at a car boot sale or politicians looking for a camera to smirk at, often that means they’re waiting for the tide to deposit a meal of worms, shellfish, squid, pilchards or mackerel sashimi.
Another promising sign can be weed. Places where it looks as if Father Neptune’s starting a compost heap are places where almost everything – bladderwrack, bits of netting, plastic bags, dead crabs and fish – fetch up on the shore and in the shallows. Of course it’s not much good casting into an impenetrable mass of flotsam and jetsam. Landing a double-figure clump of the vegetarian catch of the day can give you a good workout, and hauling in discarded plastic helps the environment as long as you take it home and bin it. But we all know it’s a frustrating business.
On the other hand, water that’s free of junk is often also free of edible goodies that bring in the bass. So I like to set up at the very edge of a tangle of trash. When you find an area where the wave and the current deposit stuff in the shallows, your work is not done. You still need to keep your local knowledge up to date.
A set of big tides or a gale can be like one of those TV garden redesign shows where the potato patch turns into a topiary pagoda and the rockery’s replaced by a scale model of the Victoria and Albert Museum. Fastmoving water alters the structure of the coast, shifting tonnes of sand, even gigantic rocks and boulders. at affects the bass treat delivery spots. Last month’s boomtown may be tomorrow’s blank central, but a short walk along the strand can take you from the land of boredom to the land of bites aplenty.
DISTANCE CURSE
One last thing about bass feeding on things that are dead or helpless is that fact that often they’re close in, and I mean very close. Logically this makes sense. Mackerel corpses, beaten up squid and shattered razor clams all wind up on the shore if nothing eats them first. ey’re thickest on the ground just a few yards from the water’s edge. So that’s where our opportunistic bass is going for a slap-up dinner.
Some of us grew up reading the likes of Clive Gammon, who waxed lyrical about slinging a bait into the third breaker. Some of us gazed in awe at photographs of Leslie Moncrieff belting an eight-ounce lead weight into the next parish. e longer I go bass fishing the more I’m convinced that the best water is usually two or three feet deep, just enough to cover the back of a good fish.
I admire the power and technique of anglers who can cast enormous distances into a howling headwind, but I’m not envious. I have no need to hurl my gear halfway to America. Once in a blue moon I’ll fish as far out as 40 yards, more often it’s about half that.
One September morning I was lobbing mackerel baits into a bouncy surf on a flat strand when a large figure loomed up out of the darkness; a Yorkshireman on holiday. He was on an all-night blank, while I’d had three bass to 7lb in an hour. Someone had told him to use giant flabby ragworms, not quite dead, maybe in a critical but stable condition. I suspect this advice had come from the person who sold him the ragworms. I suggested he tried one of my joey mackerel instead. He agreed, baited up, let it
fly and his gear went less than 100 yards. “I’d try just a little flick, twenty yards or so,” I said. He gave me a look as if I’d advised him to wear his trousers on his head, hold the rod between his legs, and whistle the Estonian national anthem.
I’m not sure if he was desperate enough to try anything or if he thought it best to humour this wild-looking Cornishman, but he cranked his reel at high speed ahead of another cast. When his shockleader hit the tip ring it jammed due to a scrap of weed on the knot. He paused to tweak at the blockage and that was when his rod almost flew from his hand as a fat five-pounder grabbed his bait.
I’d never say I think like a fish or have revolutionary ideas. Most of what I’ve learned is simple and straightforward; no secret tricks, magic marks or game-changing tackle. I try to work out what the bass are eating and try to put my bait on their buffet table, not in the car park across the road. ■