Bass on soft plastics

My new found interest in lure fishing for Bass has really served as a catalyst to the ever present ‘I need to go fishing’ niggle. I’m becoming obsessed, and like a kid in a sweet shop I’ve been easy prey for various online lure manufacturers as I start to amass a collection. Actually, that “collection” is rather modest at best (there’s a cost of living crisis remember) but I now have a handful of different metals, surface lures, shallow divers and other things in between to fling about in the hopes that a Bass might mistake one of them for sustenance. More recently I bought a few copies of popular soft plastics such as DoLive sticks and Albie Snax which can be rigged on weedless hooks. It was these I decided to concentrate on on my latest attempt to land a few silvers.

I’m thrashing the hell out of the same area at the minute – a stretch of Northumberland coastline a mile or so long with various shallow reefs, gullies and scars filled with all manner of rock and boulders amidst forests of green seaweed, bladderwrack and kelp. It’s almost daunting considering how much time and effort can be put into a single mark to unlock it and determine where and when the fish will be there. You could look at a single gulley for instance and fish it in all types of conditions:

Neap tide vs spring tide. Ebb tide vs flood tide. Flat calm vs surf. Then consider that mark may not produce in June, but it might in September. Then there’s lure choice – surface, shallow, deep. Hard lures. Soft plastic lures. early morning vs late evening – in short, almost endless variables!

And that’s just one gulley! The area i’m concentrating on is at least a mile stretch of coastline with hundreds of likely looking fish holding spots. It gives you a sense of just how much time and effort seasoned Bass anglers who’ve been doing this for years can spend figuring a mark out.

Anyway – i found a decent window to fish the area over the full flood to halfway through the ebb, with high water around 7:30pm. I arrived early afternoon and spent some time surveying the ground, much of it at this point unfishable due to the lack of water but it’s nevertheless useful to spend some time at low water scouting out the areas the fish are likely to move into with the prevailing tide. Noting loads of likely looking spots as I trudged along the coast, I found a large area of broken ground that even at low tide held a good 4-6ft of water so proceeded to start fan casting a Sandeel Pencil around the area to see if there was anything lurking. The Terns were diving close in so the area obviously held baitfish. One of them got a little too enthusiastic at the sight of my Sandeel Pencil fishing subsurface 20 yards out and made a play for it – and I had a time playing an angry Tern in flight for a bit before managing to get hold of it to extract the single hook. Thankfully i had just nicked it under the beak so the damage was superficial and, despite its livid protests, the bird flew off none the worse for wear and was diving for baitfish again two minutes later!

Anyway after maybe an hours fruitless casting I decided to try out the new soft plastics to try and get an idea of how they work. I clipped on a decent representation of a DoLive stick in an almost tea stained colour. According to the retailer this colour is supposed to represent a ‘mature sandeel’….

I’ll reserve judgement but I had a feeling that it could potentially be flexible in its appearance – with the colour not far separated from the small Rockling’s, Butterfish or Blennie’s that are an alternative staple for the Bass. I rigged it weightless on the supplied weedless hook and tested it out in the shallows.

The movement looked very enticing with a slow stop/start retrieve with the occasional twitch to get the the tail pulsing to mimic a weak baitfish darting for cover. As you pause the lure it almost hangs for a couple of seconds before sinking very slowly. This would seem like the perfect time for it to be snaffled by a hungry Bass. This is also my first time using a “weedless” lure – what an innovation! Casting this into the roughest, stickiest ground without too great a threat of it snagging up makes it a great option for this terrain.

So I set about fishing with this lure for a bit. I moved back up the coast, casting anywhere likely as I went, until I reached the area where I’ve had fish previously. There still wasn’t quite enough water here yet, so I took a break for a bit to have some lunch and generally watch the late afternoon flood progress – taking it in.

Suitably nourished and with the flood now well underway, I waded out as far as I dared onto a set of scars with some shallow channels running between them. The flooding tide was creating a nice bit of current off the front of here which looked promising, again into some shallow and rocky ground, so I began my usual approach of fan casting the area to cover it thoroughly. On the third or fourth cast I finally got a good solid WHACK and, delighted to have hooked a Bass on a new lure, I played a beautiful little schoolie to the landing net. He won’t quite have been legal size but he was welcome all the same and even more so to add another feather to my cap by catching my first Bass on a soft plastic.

Once he’s sent on his way, I continue my efforts to thrash the hell out of every inch of every nook and cranny where fish may be hiding. The flooding tide pushes me off one scar and onto the next and so on and I keep one eye on the water behind me to make sure I’m not getting cut off. Half an hour passes before Bass number two takes a liking to the soft plastic and puts up a great account of itself in the shallow water. This one goes a bit bigger, I didn’t measure it but I’d guess just over legal size – somewhere in the 45-50cm region.

Eventually the ever advancing tide calls last orders on this mark and I negotiate my way through an almost chest deep gulley to higher ground. Shortly after Marc turns up and sets about opening his account for the year, landing a Bass on his second chuck using a Savage Gear line through Sandeel.

The the last couple of hours of the flood and the first of the ebb pass relatively quietly, with both of us moving about a bit to seek out any stragglers. Marc lands his second fish of the evening, which absolutely smashed his lure just as he’s about to lift it out of the water giving him a bit of a fright!

As the now receding tide begins to relinquish possession of the scars I was on earlier, I decide to wade back out there to see if it holds any fish on the ebb. After miss-timing my foot placement a bit and going for a bit of a dunk – I manage to get onto the first of the rocky outcrops, safe but feeling a little damp! It would appear on this occasion though the soaking was not worth the effort as the Bass clearly had somewhere better to be. I move from skeer to skeer with the retreating tide, casting and recasting but to no avail and come 10:30pm I decide I’ve had my fill and head back to the car.

I have yet to fish into full darkness on this mark – mainly because the tide times have not been right when I’ve been able to get out – so I’m quite interested to see if this will make a difference next. With two more Bass under my belt though, confidence in the mark is beginning to take shape in terms of when and where to be at the right time. I’m already looking forward to get out there again.