End of season bass fishing

So, what a splendid year it's been for me, with some incredible fish (my personal best cod at somewhere between 15-16lb), some very hairy moments (coming back over those standing waves round the back of Filey Brigg in a big swell) and finally ending up with a lovely mellow September, which allowed us plenty of time to go bass fishing, even if my own work commitments weren't quite so forgiving!

In previous years I used to waste parts of my summer messing about for bass too early in the year. These days I know better and don't even head towards the bass grounds until at least August, but more usually September / October.  There is a risk with this strategy, in that in bad years you might only get one or two chances to go.  But in most years, you'll get three or four chances, and that's easily enough to get my yearly quota of bass for the freezer (generally around 10-15 fish).

This year, September was frankly a bit of nightmare work-wise, with barely a free weekend, which meant the few opportunities I did get I was straight out there catching fish.  Not much has really come on the scene this year with regard to new lures.  Yes, a couple of late additions to what have become de facto weedless type minnows and sandeel lures have come along from Sidewinder and RedGill, but they've both arrived a little too late in the year to get a thorough testing.  So once again I was down to the perennial favourites the 120 Fiiish Black Minnow (shore) in various guises and the 125 SavageGear Sandeel.   There's been a fair bit of 'ummming' and 'ahhhing' over which of these is the best lure.  The SavageGear is slightly cheaper, but the hook is exposed so you lose a lot more in the thick kelp that infests our marks.  But which catches more fish?

Well they both work, there's no doubt about that.  Casting from the kayak isn't an issue, so doesn't concern us here.  The resilience of the BM 120 is possibly a bit better, but I've had half a dozen fish on one SG sandeel without it getting totally wrecked, so they're probably about equal.  True, you can't really fish through the kelp with the SG eels, but provided you go gently over the top you won't loose too many of them.

Click to enlarge

Another engulfed SG sandeel

There is one thing I have noticed with the SG eels, and that is the fish tend to engulf them deep into their throats.  I don't know if this means the fish really believe they are sandeels or not. The SG sandeel has livelier action than the BM 120, it really waggles its tail and wobbles from side to side, and it did outfish a friend who was fishing exclusively with the BM 120 alongside me, but there are many factors at play also, such as depth, speed and type of retrieve, all of which might have played a part. As I say, both lures catch fish. But you can see how often the fish swallow the SG eel whole in the two photos either side. If you like to return your bass, this might be an issue for you. Fish hooked on the BM are generally mouth hooked.

The fishing this year has been steady rather than spectacular.  No red letter days of catching 20-30 bass or anything like that.  Instead it seems to be all single fish in small patches of water.  But over 5 or 6 hours, picking up a fish an hour gradually starts to add up.  It doesn't make for a wildly exciting day's fishing, but at least it's not a total blank.  My three sessions this year:

The largest fish in the last session was around 25", so about the 63cm mark.  A long lean fish, it gave a far better scrap than you would think given its condition, and took me about five minutes before I could get it anywhere near the surface, and this was in about 12 feet of water!

In terms of new tackle, the two recent entrants to the weedless category of soft plastics I spoke of earlier do seem to have come a bit late in the year, no idea why companies can't get their production sorted out during the winter months to have stock ready for the summer months.  What is the point of bringing a new lure to the market in late September? True the world's a big place, and it's not all about the UK, but for a company like Redgill I would have thought its main market was here and that the company would have wanted to test and try out the lures early in the season, so that they could be recommended to others for the rest of the summer!

30g Sidewinder Weedless Super Minnow in Pearl

The Sidewinder weedless minnow looks good, though the head is a bit heavy for fishing the shallow waters we favour for sea bass.  The hook has a long shank, which means it really extends right down the length of the body - this is generally a good thing, as it means you get those fish that like to nip the tail of the lures.  Choice of colours is a bit limited, and it has the feel of not really being made to target sea bass in particular, but the pearl colour is always good colour where we fish and I think this lure will do ok, particularly when the sea kicks up a bit in strong winds and you need to keep it below the waves.

The Redgill Evo Stix sandeels are a more interesting addition.  Redgills have always been a staple in the boat angler's lure box and I think this is possibly the first time they've done a weedless variant of their famous sandeel which is known to every sea bass angler that has probably ever lived.  But their high point of fame was probably back in the 1980s, when many good bass were taken on the lure. Since then, the soft plastic lure scene has exploded, particularly in the last decade and Redgill gradually lost their way amongst the plethora of Japanese and American imports.

So what does their latest soft lure, the Evo Stix offer?  And I must say it looks good and it's a good price too.  The soft plastic used is the very tough type, you can really feel it gripping the hook, so I'm quite hopeful they'll outlast even the SG eels.  The hooks seem slightly on the short side, but one good thing about them is that they are a standard worm style hook.  Unlike lures like SavageGear's 4play, that require the company's own, slightly odd hook, as standard hooks tend rip through the noses much sooner. One nice feature is that the Redgills come with a variety of weights for the same lure. The weights are simply hollow cones that slide up the line.  Sometimes this type of weight can wear on the line, particularly around the hook knot, so it's worth checking them to see if there are any rough edges on the leads that could damage or fray your line. The 10g weight in particular looks perfect for skipping the lure along the top of the kelp beds.

Mounted Redgill Evo Stix 145mm in mackerel, shown with the three included weights of 5gm, 10gm & 15gm

The kit contains 3 weights, 2 Mustard hooks and 5 bodies, which is great value for £7, particularly when you compare it with a pack of rigged Black Minnows at £6.50 that contains just a single head and two bodies. My only doubt about the design is that the hook is mounted quite a long way up towards the head, but bass generally strike at the head of the lure anyway, so we'll have to see if this is a factor in missing the odd strike (though you could say that the weight forms part of the body, so in fact the hook extends further than it looks).  I'm looking forward to testing these.  I like their simplicity and I hope they do well.

All we need now is one last spell of calm weather before the season comes to an end and I can test them out and report back!  Until then I'll leave you with another new item of tackle, my Penn Spinfisher.  This sealed reel is only in its first season, so it's a bit early to say but so far so good.  It has survived a couple of dunkings in the brine, the drag is lovely and smooth (it needs to be, there's no backwind) and it feels as smooth as when I bought it (which Penn critics will say isn't much, but it's smooth enough!).  If I'm still doing the blog, I'll report back before start of the coming year, which is when any ingress of sea water will have done it's damage.

Until next time, tight lines!

The joys and frustrations of trolling for bass

Start of the autumn bass fishing!

Well it's that time of year again when the 'cod goggles' finally get taken off and I start to focus on sea bass. My sea bass window is surprisingly short, just a few weeks, as bad weather can be a curse at this time of year. You might ask why I wait until now to target them as a species? The reason is that although you can pick up several fish over the course of session during July and August, you only really start to hit the good sessions later in the year.  Besides which, before that there's plenty of great fishing to be had with the cod, pollack and mackerel.

Anyhow, it's late September and now the chances of picking up decent bass starts to increase. I set out yesterday to try some of my favourite marks despite the unpromising forecast. Winds were predicted to be westerlies with gusts to 30mph! However, the average wind speed was meant to be around the 15mph max. Little did I know what I was letting myself in for.

If the winds were a tad on the big side, so was the tide. The two flowing in the same direction made fishing almost impossible in the morning session. With my apologies for the poor quality photographs, you can see the short steep chop making the sea messy and unpredictable. Couple that with the wind knocking off the tops of the waves and you had some pretty challenging conditions.  One factor of the Pro Fisha 575 which is usually a boon worked against me yesterday. The 575 is known to weathercock in strong winds so that you end up with your back to the wind while fishing (this behaviour is due to the classic Stealth yak design of low backside and nose being clear of the water). Generally this is what you want. But yesterday was a strong westerly and as the sun rose bright as a button in the east, I was forced to fish into the dazzle. Even with good sunglasses and a wide brimmed hat, staring into the choppy glitter for several hours was not much fun.

Short chop and strong winds made fishing difficult.

But the water looked good. Reasonably clear, but with a pronounced green, milky tinge to it. Perfect for bass fishing. If I could just get more than three casts in over a drift! It was a case of paddling 10 mins back up to the start of the mark, then hurtling down to the bottom of the mark in about 3 mins! After just a single fish over three hours, and battling almost continuous wind and wave spray, I called it a morning and went on shore to share a sandwich with some fellow kayak fishermen.

Fortified with food, the shifting position of the sun and noticing a slight drop in the wind, I set out again determined to find the bass. The tide had slowed a little as low tide was approaching, and all of a sudden the bass started to appear in numbers. The frustrating thing was that I just couldn't find them while casting! The only way I could catch any was to troll my lure behind the kayak. Inevitably this would result in an immediate hook up. I landed fish after fish, each starting to fish immediately in the area where the fish was hooked, but I couldn't entice a single fish. Eventually I'd give up, cast out and start trolling back up to the start of the mark and bang! Another fish on!

I don't have the explanation why trolling sometimes beats conventional fishing.  It must be something to do the speed, depth of the lure, etc. But it might also have something to do with the rocking action of the kayak imparting just the right movement to the lure. I tried everything I could think of to mimic the trolling action of the kayak, but I could not get a fish to bite. It's bizarre, but it's happened to me before. One of the problems when you try to recreate the action of trolling is that it's very difficult to judge the speed at which your kayak moves through the water when trolling and to then copy that using your reel while trying to counteract the effect of your drift speed. The rod too points upwards in the rod holder, meaning that the lure probably also rides higher up in the water than usual. Then there is the rocking motion of the kayak. Generally it's pretty slight, but yesterday the conditions were as rough as I'm prepared to paddle and the rod tip might have been moving more than usual.

Rare underwater shot that actually worked of a bass coming in!

Whatever the reason, thanks to being able to successfully troll I was soon getting a fish a drift and quickly got into double figures. As I went along I took some for the pot and returned the rest.  Some involuntary - one was just about to get clobbered with my priest when it gave one last wriggle for freedom, got out of my hands, over legs and into the water.  I had to laugh - bass are an aggressive fish with plenty of attitude, one of the reasons they give such good sport.

Black minnow 120 doing what was it was bought for.

Once again the soft lures proved their worth. I still meet with anglers who believe in the hard lure propaganda spread by obsessive tackle tarts on the forums. Most hard lures are an expensive rip off. Yes, I was sponsored by Duo last year. But if I can be converted to soft lures, and I got some of the best hard lures that money can buy for free, then anyone can.  Let's look at the main advantages:

1. They're cheap and effective.  About three to one against hard lures in terms of their price.
2. They use a single hook. This is so much safer in a kayak that there shouldn't really be any discussion about the matter. Why risk landing a flapping fish with three sets of trebles in between your legs?  It's bonkers! Stick with single hook lures and let's have no more horror stories of treble hooks embedded in thumbs while at sea and needing to paddle home. It's an accident waiting to happen.

Another slab-sided Yorkshire bass.  Cracking!

So despite the weather, I ended up with a bag of eight fish, with probably double that caught over the day. I've probably one or two more sessions left before the season closes for me personally. You might think that just three bass sessions per year barely counts as fishing, but it's all in the timing. I will catch more in those three sessions than I would have if I'd been ten times earlier in the year. Trust me, I've done it. Fingers crossed that the weather is kinder next time!

Tight lines.

Great video of sea kayak fishing for bass

I'd like to share this video with you of kayak fishing for sea bass in France.  If this doesn't want to make you get out there and do it again this year, nothing will!

'Arnocomment' has another nice video of himself and his son fishing on his Vimeo profile (you'll need to speak a little French to get some of the jokes). Very pleasant way to spend ten minutes of your lunchtime...    :-)

Saison 5, remix version... from arnocomment on Vimeo.

October sea bass and the Black Minnow

Once again, another bad summer leaves us desperate to continue the season for as long as possible, in the hope that one good session will make up for all the miserable weather we had this year that stopped us getting out on the sea.  This was my first ever trip for sea bass in October and I'm pleased to say that it was a success.  I'm now back, with aching limbs and back, having had the best session of the year.

Another spirited bass comes to the yak.

The autumnal weather was glorious, more summer than autumn, with bright blue skies and a steady warm breeze.  Water clarity wasn't great as usual at this time of the year.  It was more milky green than milk chocolate, and although sporadic brown chocolate patches that seem to appear and disappear as the tide swings round were there throughout the session, they certainly weren't enough to put the fish off.

This year has really been a revelation for me concerning soft plastics. After last year's nightmare of getting a treble hook deeply embedded in the end of my thumb and nearly passing out trying to rip it out with a pair of pliers, I've found that I'm reaching for my hard plastics (often with three sets of treble hooks) with a certain reluctance.  Small bass are a nuisance in the kayak and in my opinion, so is a net. Most soft plastics fish with a single hook which is a great advantage when you've got a frisky young bass thrashing about between your legs in a kayak.  You really don't want a set of needle sharp trebles getting stuck into anything down there, including your expensive dry suit or otherwise!  

But soft plastics also catch fish.  In fact, I am coming round to the opinion that they will out fish hard plastics on most occasions.  And finally, while hard plastics are undoubtedly works of art, they are very expensive. Yes, soft lures will never cast as well as a good plug from Duo or Megabass and from the shore that's a problem, but they are a third of the price.  That's a big incentive when it's so easy to lose a lure to snags (pot rope anyone?), and when you add the single hook benefits for kayakers and weedless rigging, you can see why I've been reaching for the hard plastics in my lure box less and less often this year. 

I previously mentioned how good a lure SavageGear Sandeels are for cod, pollack and sea bass.  The different sizes let you fish for all three, and you can buy replacement heads for them.  The one great weakness with soft plastics, and this is something that particularly affects SavageGear Sandeels is that the soft plastic is easily damaged by repeated casting or by the mouths of fish.  I'd estimate that the 25g SavageGear Sandeel lasts at most for four fish before it's too badly ripped to continue using. Of course, your mileage may vary - you might have it ripped after a single fish. On a busy day, when you're getting a lot of schoolies, this can get annoying as you can go through several packs quite quickly.

Luckily, a French company has come up with a really novel soft plastic design.  One that both protects the soft body from casting stress and fish attacks, and yet allows you to rig it weedless.  I am of course, talking about the Black Minnow Fiiish®:

Both the models pictured here (120mm) are suitable for using from the kayak.  I probably prefer the 12g model, as you can work it more realistically over shallow ground, as I'll discuss later.  Anyhow enough about the Black Minnow, let's get on with the catch report!

The sea was a little bit too lumpy arriving at my chosen mark for my liking, but as time went by and the wind dropped, the sea flattened off and made it very fishable.  Indeed, as the tide picked up, I started getting fish to my sandeels on a regular basis.  Nothing huge, but at least I was catching. But after five or six fish, and three body changes on my SavageGear Sandeel, I just ran out of the 25g size.  I didn't want to go heavier (42g), as it was only a few metres deep, probably less if you include the kelp, so I decided to give my new lures from Fiiish a try.  The Fiiish Black Minnow 120 has an ingenious method of attaching the soft plastic and the hook, which leaves both the hook and plastic free to move about.  Whether this really contributes much to the lure's action I can't say (doesn't look as if it does), but where it gives the lure a big advantage is that the lure is pushed up out of harms way when you hook a fish.  As the hook is not actually embedded in the lure (it goes into a slot in the body), there's nothing to rip out, and as a consequence, the soft body lasts much longer than most soft plastics.

I started to get quite a few fish on it.  Some were decent fish, around the 55cm mark.

I was even confident of the hook hold to try my luck at a few underwater shots.  The Black Minnow seems to get a really good hook hold:

I found that I could even lift the smaller fish in by holding onto the jig head of lure - unlike a hard plastics, there's no risk that I'll end up impaling myself on a stray treble:

You can see here how the soft body has moved up the hook shank out of harm's way, avoiding getting ripped and damaged by the mouth of the fish.  Great design, and a very impressive lure.  I ended up with 8 fish to the Black Minnow and the body was still usable.  Sure it had started to rip in places, but it was still catching fish. One thing to also note is that if you leave the Black Minnow hook inside the body after it's been in the sea, you can expect it to rust. Best to dismantle it after a session, or at least remove the hook. Compare this to the SavageGear Sandeel after 3 fish and you can see what a difference not having the hook actually embedded in the plastic makes to the longevity of the lure (click to enlarge):

 

What interested me most was that using a straight retrieve (slow, as there's no risk snagging with the Black Minnow - another great feature!), I was hitting a lot of smaller bass.  Then I tried "twitching" it back to me, twitch, reel, twitch, reel, twitch, bang!!  I started suddenly getting bigger bass.  It was like magic.  From that moment on, the pesky little schoolies stopped and the lure seemed to attract  bigger fish.  Best of the day was this handsome beast, just short of 60cm nose to tail:

Over the four hours I had maybe twenty fish.  I even managed an hour out to try and get some cod over deeper water once the sea had flattened off.  But I am cursed this year for cod!  Yet again the cod wouldn't show and I still don't have a single cod in my freezer - very frustrating year.  A couple of small pollack were all I could find while having my "time out" for cod, so I gave up and went back to the bass, catching another five or six more before calling it a day.  

All in all, a great way to end the season.  And a fantastic new lure to add to my collection.  I'm convinced this type of lure is the future, at least for kayak anglers where casting distance isn't an issue and where landing fish (without a net) can be dangerous when there are stray treble hooks flying about.  The Black Minnow is a very clever design, and for me it's probably the best soft lure there is at the present moment.  I'll definitely be adding some more to my collection this winter!

Tight lines to all those still fishing.

Last of the summer bass...

As luck would have it, there was a tiny window of calm amid the 20mph plus winds and 3ft swells that seem to have lasted all August and into the start of September.  Last year, a bad year was only saved by having one fantastic session in September, when the fish were virtually jumping into my kayak.  Could this year see a repeat?

First of all let me apologise for the absence of photos.  I'd been messing about with my camera, and sure enough forgot to put it back in the bag for my next trip out.  So the only photos I can show are from my phone inside its waterproof case - hence the rather blurry photo.

Anyhow, back to the fishing.  It was a good day, but nothing like as good as last year.  This year the fish were much harder to come by, couldn't find any shoaling up like they generally do at this time of year and instead they were spread out very thinly across a wide area.  I eventually located a good patch, but so had a whole bunch of other anglers, all of whom were fishing for bass.  Must have counted 3 from the shore spinning with plugs and another 5 or 6 boats trolling lures all in the same place.  Not really my scene to be fighting in amongst the crowds, but unfortunately I couldn't pick my time or place, given the weather.  And it looked like everyone else was in the same boat! (sorry, couldn't resist that one)

Started out with soft plastics, which were working well and certainly seemed to outfishing those who were trolling using hard plastics.  But it was only when I changed to first to a Saltiga Minnow 120, and then to the Tide Minnow of the same length, that I started to hit bigger, more aggressive fish.  I lost a beautiful fish of somewhere between 5 and 6 pounds right at the edge of the kayak.  It fought like an absolute demon, and for a while I couldn't get it anywhere near the yak.  Then finally, it came up close for a moment and stopped thrashing and spinning about.  I tried to get my lip grabbers in its mouth, but as soon as it saw them it started again and flipped out one of the trebles.  Then, with one hook still in place, I had another go and the same thing happened.  I actually had my hand round the fish this time, in the vain hope I get a grip on it but it was too big to get my hand round.  One good kick of her tail and she slipped through my fingers and away!

Still, the very next cast I had the pleasure of watching my lure coming towards me and another good fish come up behind it and grab the lure, and then shake its head like a terrier with a rat!  Fantastic to see in the water like that.  This time I got it safely in.  I kept fishing for a bit, adding the odd fish, but eventually the wind picked up and things got a bit too hairy to stay out there.  I paddled for home in what turned out to be really tough conditions.  In fact by the time I got back, it was too rough for me to try gutting my fish out on the water.  I opted to come ashore and do the job on land.  Doesn't always go down well with folk on the beach, but I firmly believe in feeding the crabs, rather than chucking that stuff in the bin.  Anyhow, here's the fish on a bit of bladderwrack, just before I start gutting them (the knife in the foreground is the No. 12 Slim Bubinga Opinel - a good knife for this sort of work).

Best was around 50cm+ nose to tail fork, which is right on the limit of what I can freeze whole.  Not huge, but I don't like taking them much bigger than this.  Each year I try to take about 15 fish.  About a third of those will be eaten fresh, and the remainder go in the freezer for the winter months.  Bass keep pretty well in the freezer, not as well as cod or other white fish, but certainly good enough for 4 or 5 months.  We generally eat bass about once or twice a month (we eat fish at least once a week).  So that's either two small bass per meal or one large one shared between two, which means I usually don't need to buy any until about March / April time, just when they'd be getting a bit tough from the freezer anyway.  Plus buying them from the supermarket around then whets my appetite for the coming season!   I'm one of those who prefer small bass for eating as I like to have the option of serving them baked whole.

So far that makes 11 bass for the freezer this year, so a bit less than usual, but I'm hoping the current storms will stop at some point, giving me one last chance to get back out on the water.  It's been a total disaster this year for me in terms of cod and pollack, but there's still an outside chance I may get another late bass or two before the dark nights descend on us again.

Best wishes and tight lines to all those able to fish!

First bass of the season

After hearing reports on a well-known local forum that my favourite bass mark had not fished well the day before, I wondered what my first trip of the year would bring me.  The weather forecasts were excellent: calm, nearly windless, most importantly, overcast.  I don't like fishing in bright sun, especially if the water's clear, as it can often kill the fishing completely.

The overcast conditions were definitely a factor in the day's success.  As the sun started to get brighter towards lunchtime, the fishing likewise got slower and slower and eventually I stopped catching.  Before that though, there seemed to be plenty of fish about.

This time of year is still a bit early for bass.  You can catch them, and with persistence you might come home with several.  But you don't get the best sessions until later in the year, when the fry have grown in size and the bass have started to become very aggressive in hunting them.  This latter part of the season is when the hard lures really come out on top.  Particularly lures such as Megabass Zonk or Xraps, that feature very heavy side to side vibration (much like the way small mackerel swim), can sometimes provoke the whole shoal into a feeding frenzy.  I've tried soft lures in such cases and they've not caught well, if at all.

But early on in the season, it's a very different story.  The fish are more cautious, and it pays to use the more naturalistic soft lures rather than a hard lure.  Don't get me wrong, you will catch on both.  But I believe that I catch more fish now early on in the season because I use soft lures.  Later on, literally in a few weeks time, I'll switch to hard lures as the bass get more aggressive.  But for now, soft lures seem to always outfish their hard counterparts.

The great thing about soft lures is that they are not generally expensive.  I'm a great fan of Savage Gear's Sandeel, in both the 25g and 42g models.  I particularly the natural colour, but the blue variant also works.  Over shallow waters, particularly if you are trolling the lure behind you, the 25g is the best general choice.  You can still cast it pretty well (though nothing like as far as good hard lure), and reeled in just quick enough to keep it off the bottom it can entice some big bass.

Another fantastic Yorkshire sea bass.

Unfortunately, the pictures of that day's catches are all a bit blurred, as I had several goes at trying to get a shot of the bass fighting under water.  I had some moderate success:

Bass heading off in the opposite direction.

In the heat of the moment, I forgot to clean the sea water off the lens of the camera, resulting in every shot having the same great big blurs across it:

But this is a minor matter - I was just happy to be catching bass in good numbers.  I probably hooked about 8 and landed 5.  Plus a pollack and a mackerel.  Bit of a mixed bag, but I'm not complaining!

The real highlight of the day for me was seeing an otter come swimming past the end of my kayak.  I was eating my sandwiches, when what I thought was a baby seal swam past within about 20 metres of me.  To be honest I didn't realise what it was until it dived and I saw its tail and hind legs.  I did think it was a strange seal to be swimming along with it's head on the surface!   It's first for me: the Yorkshire sea otter - who needs to go to California to see them?  ;-)  No idea where it came from or where it was going.  The nearest river on that stretch of the coast is at least 20 miles off.  Great animal to see though, and along with a seal that showed me where the fish were in the first place, and various diving birds all round me, I had a quite safari to contend with!

Tight lines to all.

Sea bass feeding frenzy!

After a few bad trips, and generally poor finish to the season for sea kayak fishing, everything came good.  As so often with memorable trips, the feeding blitz came out of nowhere, totally unexpected and in difficult conditions to boot.  It just goes to show that you can never stop learning when sea bass fishing, and you have to constantly question your assumed knowledge if you want to continue to be successful.

I arrived on what seemed like a windless day as I drove to the coast.  But on the beach itself, a stiff breeze was gusting and white horses were flecking the horizon.  It still looked worth a chance though, as I thought I could make a line of clearer water before the point at which the white horses started, giving me a narrow band to try and find some fish.  I launched and quickly realised the sea was a lot "friskier" than I had thought.  Decidedly lumpy, as kayakers say!  Worse, after a couple of drifts of my initial mark there was no sign of a fish anywhere.  With the tide rapidly going out, I decided to head out to some other marks that generally fish best on low tide.

But everywhere I tried, I faced the same thick cloudy water and not a sign of fish or fish-feeding birds anywhere.  I always keep an eye out for cormorants and guillemots, as these birds are excellent indicators that fry or sandeel are available.  As a rule of thumb, this generally means the bass aren't far behind.  However on this particular day, I could only see cormorants sunning themselves on the rocks - never a good sign to see the professionals are not fishing!

I paddled and paddled, and paddled some more.  Finally, I thought that's it.  There are no fish about.  I'll go to my last mark, put an X-Rap on and troll it back.  If I get nothing I'll just call it a day.  The tide was turning and starting to move at pace as I reached the mark, and I noticed a slight clearing of the water.  And a pair of seals.  Don't generally mind them being around, as I take their presence much the same way as I like to see diving birds.  I stopped and drifted a little while I changed to the X-Rap, and then started to slowly paddle back.  Bang!  Unbelievable!!  My trusty, rusty little X-Rap had found a fish:

First rule of kayaking is find the fish.  Second rule is stay with the fish!

I quickly tried another cast and bang!  Another fish.  Now from past experience I know this means that I've found where the fish are grouped up at this particular point in the tide.  This means you've got a limited window in which to profit.  You must stay with the fish, but that doesn't mean the fish themselves won't start to move as water heights and currents change over the sea bed.

I also know that once you've found them, and they are in a feeding frenzy, you are going to catch a lot.  It really doesn't matter what plug you put on, within reason most plugs will catch.  I repeatedly cast the little X-Rap SXR10 and it caught a fish every cast.  After reaching double figures, I wondered if I might be able to select for slighter bigger fish using a longer minnow type plug.  On went my sponsor's Duo Tide Minnow Slim 120 in J222:

Yep, that worked nicely.  The problem (and it's a nice problem to have) is that when you are catching a fish every cast, you quickly get frustrated at having to waste valuable time unhooking them.  And one of the features of Tide Minnows I don't like (along with many other minnow style plugs) is the fact that they have 3 treble hooks.  I looked for an alternative:

As you can see here, the shape of Daiwa Saltiga Minnow 120 is practically identical to the Duo TMS 120.  The main differences are that the DSM 120 is heavier and has two large trebles.  But the trebles on the DSM 120 are not just larger, they are heavyweight wire hooks that won't bend easily: ideal for a day such as this when I'm expecting to get a lot of fish.  Thin wire hooks, while admittedly being sharper, can quickly get bent out of shape.  Three trebles can cause unnecessary damage to fish, particularly in the situation I was facing in which the fish are competing to get the lure.  In these situations I have hooked two bass at once, not good for either the bass or plug, as it can often get broken or the hooks ruined.

Fish after fish after fish hit the Daiwa Saltiga Minnow 120.

For the next two hours, I probably had just two or three casts in which the plug made it back to the kayak without getting hit by a bass!  The competition between the fish was evident, with sometimes 5 or 6 fish chasing alongside the hooked fish in the water - a fantastic sight.  Quite often my lure would get hit 2 or 3 times, but the bass never gave up.  They repeatedly came back at the lure until they got hooked, and because the leading fish usually caught the lure it would often try and swallow the plug as deeply as it could:

In fact, even changing to a two treble lure didn't mean I could avoid all unnecessary damage to fish.  I like to return everything I don't keep in good condition, with the best chance of survival possible.  On a day like today, with the fish frantic to get to the lure first, there are some that swallow the lure so deep that there's nothing you can do:

If my pliers can't reach the bottom hook, I knock them on the head immediately.

The tide had now swung round and was flowing hard, but by a miracle the wind was gusting in the opposite direction, allowing me to keep the kayak in the hot spot over the fish for 10-15 minutes at a time.  I was incredibly lucky with how the conditions turned out.  The water cleared and now the bigger bass were coming up from the depths to hit that lure hard:

Another fine slab-sided Yorkshire bass.

The photos don't show it, but it was surprisingly choppy out there.  I noticed the average stamp of fish was getting better, and lost a couple around the 6lb mark.  Suddenly I noticed after a couple of smaller fish had thrashed around on the surface that something was wrong with the plug.  Turned out my clip was mangled beyond repair:

Delalande Agrafe Rapide Inox No. 6, as recommended by Henry Gilbey, and as destroyed after 20 plus bass! Personally I find these clips fiddly and won't be using them again.

Suddenly before I knew it, high tide was fast approaching and the fish just vanished.  It was as if they had never been there.  I went ashore to gut my catch.  One day I'll make a proper descaler, as bass scales are a chore to remove before cooking the fish and quickly clog up a sink.  After so many recent trips coming home empty handed, today felt like I had hit the jackpot and I pretty much made up the remainder on my self-imposed yearly quota (~20 sea bass per year).

It was a great day, perhaps my best in 5 years of sea kayaking.  One thing that reminds you constantly that you're dealing with an efficient, well-armoured predator is that your hands get cut to ribbons.  It doesn't help that they are constantly wet from paddling or handling fish, so your skin is soft and more prone to taking the damage that gill spikes and fin spines can cause - but hey, who cares?  It was worth it!

Proof of catching a lot of sea bass!

The end of our season is fast approaching, but if I don't get to go again this year I won't mind.  It was an incredible day, one that will stay in my memory for many years.

Drinking chocolate seas

I should have known better.  A single 24-hour break from nearly two week's worth of gales and I thought it had to be worth a try.  Wrong!

It was one slimy, muddy, hot and sunny day out there - no chance of bass!

The conditions were appalling.  I can't remember lure fishing for bass in water like it.  After the big storms, the water was thick with sediment and weed, while the fish were surely gorged on crab and worms thrown up in the rough seas.  Not only that, but as the hours ticked by I realised that the water temperature has really dropped over the last month.  Surely a sign the sea bass season is coming to an end in Yorkshire.  Was it already getting too cold?

But even in these horrendous conditions, as the wind picked up and the tide started moving at pace over some shallow ledges, I thought I'd risk a lure and troll back up against the tide.  At the rocky headland where I fish, the water is literally 3 or 4 ft deep on the southern side for several hundred yards.  At certain points in the tide, the water kicks up into standing waves as the backflow pushes up against the oncoming tide.  It's not pretty kayaking, and it has to be pretty calm before you want to try it, but in the right conditions I always suspected fish would be there.

The problem is getting snagged.  The shallowness of the water means that bladder wrack reaches up almost to the surface and wraps its fingers around anything with hooks. As I paddled and trolled, I kept looking behind me to see if I was snagging up.  Suddenly the rod arched over.  Nine times out of ten it's a snag, so no reason to panic.  But then I saw the rod kick, and I reached back and yanked the rod out its holder.  Sure enough, a nice thick set bass was ploughing through the seaweed and being pretty reluctant to show itself.  After a few minutes, with the tide rushing me further out to sea and deeper water every minute, I got my first glimpse.  I was quite chuffed to catch at all given the conditions.  Even better that it was a reasonable fish:

Once again, that middle treble on my Zonk Gataride was causing grief.  All three hook points were embedded in the lower gill cover.  I took one look at it and realised I'd have to knock it on head to get the hook out.  Still, it was a fine fish for our supper that night, and sometimes you have to be grateful for what little luck comes your way.  Coming into contact with a fish raised my hopes.  But it was not to be.  Six hours at sea, one fish.  Very poor.  We can only hope the weather calms down in the last few weeks remaining of the season.  With the water temperature dropping fast it won't be long until lure fishing stops completely.

But until, tight lines for those who brave the conditions!

Me 5, Bass 1 !

This was another trip decided on the spur of the moment around 8pm the previous evening.  Unfortunately in my rush I forgot to charge any of my device batteries.  This meant my waterproof camera, phone and VHF radio all ran out of juice while out at sea which wasn't clever and a shame really, given the incident and fish packed trip, as it resulted in just two photos taken with the last few seconds of battery life left in my phone.  Still, what I can't do in pictures, I can do in words, eh?!

Conditions were near perfect on arrival: gloomy and overcast, with a light breeze.  The sea was a touch cloudy more or less everywhere, after a week of heavy rain, but while that didn't put the fish off it did mean I couldn't see what ground I was fishing over.

Started the day using a baby Zonk 77, which netted me a nice fish on my last outing.  The fish came more or less steadily, one every 20 mins or so, but nothing much over a pound.  By lunchtime I was into double figures, but for the life of me couldn't locate any better sized fish.  Despite my predjudice against 3 treble hook plugs, I first tried an IMA Susuke 120 and then a Zonk Gataride to see if they would find some better fish.  To be fair the Gataride did bring me a couple of marginally bigger fish, but it also caught far fewer fish than the baby Zonk.  Plus both fish on the Gataride came in all tangled up in the trebles which isn't pretty (apologies for photo quality, it was from my phone through an Aquapack, making it look misty which it certainly wasn't!):

One treble hook in the right place, the others just causing mischief.

But to be honest, the Gataride really slowed the fishing up.  Even though the fish I caught were marginally bigger, I prefer catching to not catching and so decided on another change.  On went my favourite plug for the kayak: the Rapala SRX10 X-Rap in blue mackerel.  This radically improved my catches, particularly when I was trolling it behind the yak while looking for new marks.  For some reason this plug is really attractive to bass when trolling, and I generally go back to where a trolled fish was caught and try to catch more by casting around the area, as bass often go around in small groups.  But either the fish were solitary, or I couldn't replicate the speed or manner of retrieve when trolling.  It was quite frustrating - as soon as I gave up and headed off to a new mark, bang!  A fish would grab the trolled X-Rap! 

It was while fishing with the X-Rap the bass got one back on me.  A lively little fish came in, thought I won't bother with the grips this time. I lifted its head above the water against the side of the yak and tried to grab the top of the plug. Fish goes bonkers just as I got hold of the plug and bang, the top treble hook sinks into the end of my thumb near the nail, right up to the bend of the hook, well past the barb.  Luckily I had a good grip of the plug and the fish wriggled off, leaving me with an X-Rap in my thumb. I tried pulling the treble out with my right hand and I couldn't do it. So I got my pliers out and tried with them. Still couldn't do it. Thought I wasn't being man enough, i.e. just wasn't pulling hard enough.  But I gave that hook a massive tug with the pliers and it didn't move.  It's tough, rubbery flesh just there and that hook wasn't moving so much as a millimetre, it was almost like it was stuck in bone.  Pain getting worse each time I struggle with the pliers. Thought about snipping it off but it wouldn't have been any easier to paddle back, and might have worked its way in even further. Plus the hook was in that deep it would have been hard to get anything under the bend of the hook to cut it, so I would have had to cut the two other hooks off the treble and then the main stem of the treble, which seemed like a lot of hassle.

I remembered something about having to make the entry point twice as large as the size of the hook's barb by pushing back against the wound on the opposite side to the barb. I pushed hook shank until it ripped the opening wider.  This sounds easy, but it's actually incredibly hard to do as the bend of hook is blunt and deep flesh wounds don't just "rip" open easily.  It was bloody hard work (literally) but eventually I got it out, though not after I nearly had a "turn" while doing it and felt a bit faint!!  Fainting in the kayak with a plug in your hand wouldn't have been wise, but I gritted my teeth and got back to it.  It knocked the breath out of me for a bit but I was so glad it was out.  For a while afterwards I couldn't reel in or even think but again forced myself and after a while got used to it.  Needless to say, every fish after that was landed using my lip grips!

It seemed to be a day for stray trebles causing trouble.  Next up, a sea gull dived on my X-Rap and got hooked.  It came out of nowhere and was too fast for me to react.  Generally I can pull the lure out of the way, but this bird was too quick and grabbed the lure before it had dived deep enough to escape and ended up with a hook in its beak.  Luckily it was a young bird and quite light.  I gently brought it in and it was surprisingly calm, the hooks more or less fell out as soon as I had it in my hands and I let it flap off, a lot less worse than myself for the experience of getting hooked up!

Anyhow, it was about time to go and I had just two fish in my bag, despite having caught plenty.  Trolled the X-Rap on the way back and you can guess what happened.  First, rod thumps over and line rips off the reel.  I quickly land the best fish of the session and paddle back to where I hooked it.  First cast, another decent fish.  Bang that one on the head and get back to roughly the same place.  First cast again another good fish.  Paddled back again after dispatching that one and then lost them. Tried casting all around the area, but I hadn't made a good mental note of exactly where I'd been hooking them and I must have drifted off the mark.

Decided it was now time to call it a day and came ashore to gut the fish.  With literally seconds of battery life left on my phone I managed the last photo of the day:

Wet seaweed and sea bass.

All in all a good session, despite the hook in the thumb incident and the dead batteries of my various electronic devices which has meant a diminished blog article!  It would have been nice to have a photo of the hook in my thumb as it was quite impressively gruesome, and one of the sea gull just for novelty value, but my main camera was dead and you can't operate my phone's camera in its aquapack with one hand!

There will be a bit of break now from the blog, as I'm spending time out from fishing for family stuff.  The blog will no doubt return in about a month, weather permitting.  Tight lines to all and a good summer's fishing!

Back on the bass

The freezer is getting close to capacity with the cod, pollack and mackerel we've been catching these last few weeks, so the time has come to start eating them and turning back to catching sea bass!  For Yorkshire the season is still just a little early for the best sessions to start.  The fish are there, as they are earlier in the year, but they don't shoal up and go into that fry feeding frenzy until late July / August.  The fish that are caught now tend to be solitary fish or one out of a small group.  The trick is finding a good mark that is getting plenty of visits from these wandering individuals or small groups of fish.

The week's swell and wind forecasts looked grim ahead, with the following day the only possibility for kayaking.  I decided it had to be done, even though my bass tackle wasn't fully prepared and I could really do with some new line and a decent coolbox for my catch.  Anyhow, after a slow start I got down to the sea in time to launch around 9am, just as the sun threatened to ruin the day by opening up a bright blue sky overhead.  Fortunately for me, the water wasn't crystal clear and by mid afternoon it began to cloud over, which really helped the fishing.

Sometimes, early in the season, I struggle with big noisy plugs such as Megabass Zonks.  They are dynamite later in the year, but this sort of plug can sometimes make fish shy away after following it to the side of the yak, and when that happens I usually try and go down a size and opt for something a bit quieter running, or even to use a soft plastic.  One plug I've found to be always reliable early in the year is the tried and trusted Rapala X-Rap SXR10 in  Silver Blue Mackerel:

Battered but much loved X-Raps SXR10 in Silver Blue Mackerel

Bass on our coastline love this plug, perhaps because there seem to be quite a few small mackerel in the same vicinity which are a perfect match colourwise.  The X-Rap SRX10 probably catches me more fish per year than any other (despite the influx of ridiculously expensive Japanese plugs that keep getting added to my tackle box!) and it catches in a wide variety of conditions.  They are cheap, easy to find (not always in the right colour) and tough as nails.  The plug's finish is mostly on the inside, so that expensive paintwork you see getting scratched off some plugs isn't an issue with the X-Rap.  This particular colour is the one that works best for me, I like the fact it's predominantly dark and of course striped, which I feel helps in bright clear conditions, but if you can't find it then the Sardine colour is good second best.

Fishing was slow due to the bright sun initially, but after a while I found a very bassy looking patch of ground.  My preference when fishing from the kayak is to be in about 10-15ft of water.  I like to be able to see the bottom.  Partly so I can judge what depth I'm fishing in, but also to be able to see what kind of cover I'm drifting over and how high up those kelp stalks are reaching!  Good ground for me is a mixture of bare, flat rock scars or ledges, seaweed and even a little sand.  The more varied the better, but sometimes drawing a plug over kelp forests covered by 6 foot or so of water can also bring results.  At this point in the article I had planned to post some photos of the various marks I drifted over, unfortunately without a polarised filter for the camera (rare for waterproof models!) you can't see anything but water glare.

After three or four small fish, I started to get one or two of a better size which I kept for the pot.  As the X-Rap was catching and I already had some fish to take home, I started to experiment with some of my other smaller plugs.  This year I've followed a policy of using two treble hook plugs where possible.  This results in a lot less incidental fish damage due to stray trebles hooking their eyes and gills, and also less fish lost due to them diving into heavy weed and hooking a free treble up against a snag.  My top baby lure for the day was the new Megabass Zonk 77 SW-HT SAYORI:

The bite-size Megabass Zonk 77 SW-HT SAYORI.  A great colour and really tight action.

This lure casts better than the longer X-Rap and has a really aggressive vibrating action, again similar to a tiny mackerel and the colouring is fantastic.  The lure has clear sides that reveal the moving weights inside and it's green back looks great in the water.  It wasn't long before I had a lunging take nearly pull the rod out of my hand and after an excellent tussle on my ultra-light plugging rod, I landed a nice bass around the 3-4lb mark:

I would have kept fishing for a while after this, but had to stop to go and pick up my little lad from nursery!  I ended the day with a tidy bag of four bass and a stray mackerel that picked up the baby zonk while I trolled it behind the kayak on the way back in.

While I always gut my fish at sea, I can never bring myself to cut the head off bass as I do with cod, probably as I like to bake them whole and they look a lot nicer presented like that to the table.  Cod just gets filleted before it goes in the freezer, so although it doesn't make for the prettiest photo opportunity at the end of a session, the heads can go to feed the crabs as far as I'm concerned, which in turn feed even more cod for us to catch!  Nothing goes to waste when fishing from a kayak, even if the gulls sometimes get the guts before the crabs have chance. 

Yet another fish-between-the-legs shot, must find a different angle to take the photos from!

The bass season is under way, and I'm hopeful better fish will be coming on board in the coming month.  Bring on those calm clear waters of summer!

Giant jigging shad outfishes pirk!

So with big catches of cod getting reported by my fishing friends, I decided to head back to the cod grounds and see if not only some cod could be caught, but perhaps some pollack and mackerel too.  We'd not heard any reports of mackerel around the Whitby area, but we were hopeful they might have started coming inshore. 

It was another early, early start.  My alarm was set for 2.45am, but guess what, a text from my friend asking me if I was coming woke me up at 2.30am!  Up I got, made some sandwiches and was on the road by 3am.  Just over an hour and half later we're paddling out from Runswick Bay.  There's just the slightest of breezes to begin with, which gave a little drift against what was left of the tide.  But there just didn't seem to be any fish.

 A little later and the breeze gave way to flat calm... and then it started to rain!

 

The sea was full of jellyfish.  Every colour and type imaginable, from some with clearly defined shapes to some that looked like gobs of phlegm floating mid water!

The water looked clear, but you can see the flash in the photo above picks out the sediment that's still there.  In addition to the jellyfish, I also saw a lumpfish swim past me, now that is one ugly brute of a fish and a bit of shock to see it come gliding along next to the kayak just a few feet away!

But still we were struggling for fish.  My mate was fishing with a standard pirk and hokkais set up (see here), while I was fishing with what I hoped was a better alternative that replaces the pirk with a  Storm Wildeye Giant Jigging Shad (15cm, 135g).  I wanted to test the theory that while some bottom feeders such as cod will go for a pirk, most fish see the pirk as another fish chasing sandeels (the hokkais).  Therefore a better representation of a chasing fish might lead to better catches on the hokkais.  Plus I thought that there might be the odd fish big enough to have a go for the giant shad.

Sure enough, I started to catch first and as the tide picked up I went through a purple patch of hitting pollack after pollack.  Each one caught on the first hokkai above the giant shad, which pretty much confirmed my theory.  In a short while I had five nice pollack ready for heading and gutting:

What was curious was that I wasn't picking up any cod on the hokkais.  Then, all of a sudden, a nice fat lump attached itself somewhere in the deep!  When it came up, I was delighted to see a good cod had nailed the giant shad in just the way I'd hoped!

Once the mackerel run starts, I'll expect the average size of the cod to go up and I'm hopeful this method will net me a double figure cod this year.  Those giant shads are really life-like and that big paddle tail sends out massive vibrations down in the depths, which is why I think my set up outfished my mate's traditional pirk-based set up by about 3 to 1 in terms of fish landed. Plus none of my fish were foul-hooked, and given that the main of them came mouth-hooked to the first hokkai above the shad, I'm sure our reasoning behind it is correct: fish see the shad as competition chasing sandeel, and they compete and win (or not, depending on whether your point of view is that of the caught fish!).  The only downside I can see to this method is the cost of the shads.  The Storm Wildeye Giant Jigging Shads are expensive (I found them for about £10 delivered) compared to a standard pirk (~£2), and if you lose the jig head (as I did on a pot line) then you are left with just a couple tails.  Also watch out for fish biting the tail off the shad - every now and then fetch it back up to check it's still there!  But compare the giant shads to the cost of butterfly jigs or a good Japanese plug, then they look relatively good value.  I would be interested in trying to cast our own jig heads as I have plenty of old lead.  However, I've yet to see the right mould as I'd prefer to user much lighter grade hooks than the one which comes with the Giant Shad as it's an absolute beast, apparently designed for hauling up 250lb halibut - a little bit over the top for our 10lb cod!
 
Anyhow, back to the report.  The fishing dropped off as slackwater approached.  Although it was calm, there was a surprising swell  that made getting ashore on the rocky cliffs of Kettleness difficult.  Eventually we beached near Dog Holes, a pair of caves just at the base of the cliff:

By now it was approaching lunch and the tide was about dead.  We kept trying for fish, my mate went outwards for mackerel while I kept shadding for cod.  I just used a simple ounce bullet over a normal 4" shad and this was good enough for a couple more.  It's always magic to me how much cod like shads, they seem to pick out the cod from other fish.  After a bit, even the shads stopped working so I thought I'd have a go for some bass close in.  In can be a bit risky fishing close in to Kettleness over Fillet Tail, as big waves come up out of the depths as the ground suddenly shallows up.  If you fish here, keep your wits about you.  It can be calm for five minutes and then five or six big waves will come up out of nowhere and often break a good distance from the shore.  Very easy to get turned out of your kayak when that happens.

Anyhow, I've not had much success here for bass, though in fairness I've never really given it a lot of effort.  I put on my 42g Savage Gear Sandeel that worked well for me the previous week, and to my surprise I hit a bass within 5 minutes:

This one went back but it's encouraging to find them there this early in the season, and I'm sure there are others of a better size.  I reckon this size of sandeel will be great for those big pollack that will be appearing around here in the autumn.  All in all, it was a good trip with plenty of fish.  I ended up with 14 fillets in my freezer.  It would have been nice to have a few mackerel too, but I'm sure they'll be along in the next week or two!