People: Myself
Duration: One hour or so
Tide: Low, right on the turn
Weather: Dull, sultry, humid, slight easterly breeze rippling an otherwise flat sea
Bait: Frozen sandeel
Rigs: various soft/hard lures and plugs, Jif lemon floats
Results: Nothing landed, but the satisfaction of confirming a theory.
Report: Went back to a small rock filled cove where I caught a 6lb 12oz bass last July. The locals had told me it was just a lucky fluke in North Mayo, but the place had the feel of a typical West Waterford bass haunt, so I was keen to find out if they could be found there with any predictability in the right conditions.
At low tide the place looks a nightmare, boulders and weed everywhere, just waiting to gobble up any lures mad enough to venture among them. At the bottom of the tide, a flat spit of rock is exposed that lets you walk out among the weed beds and cast beyond to clear water. I put on a small softie and flicked it out, and when it hit the water, a startled black-backed bass about 6ft inshore of it did a noisy about-turn and shot off to the left. I recast in the direction it was headed but it was gone under the thickest of the weed. But at least they were there...
After lashing the water in vain for a bit and getting regularly hung up on the brown-spaghetti weed, I switched over to the Jif lemon - clipped on the end of the line, not sliding, and with a short 2ft trace and 1/0 hook. Bait was a small frozen sandeel with my patent addition, a cod liver oil capsule impaled on the hook to leak an extra scent trail. I was still clipping things up when I heard a swirl. In the pool behind me to the right, in a barely couple of feet of water and only yards from the shore, two medium sized bass were casually nosing through the weedy boulders. Of course as soon as I stood up, they turned and headed back out. I chucked the float in the same direction and waited, and I think something nosed round the float itself, but there were no takers for the sandeel.
The tide was turned by this stage, and the rock spit was shrinking under me, so after a few more goes with different lures, I had to hop back to land. Disappointing not to get even a bite when you're standing right in the middle of the fish, but I'm happy to have proved that bass are now around on a regular basis in NW Mayo. Thank you global warming...
Incidentally, the one I caught last year had roe in it, and a stomach full of hardback crab. Maybe peelers on the float will do the trick.
Last edited by hugo on Mon Jun 29, 2009 8:33 am, edited 2 times in total.