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Landed this beauty second cast during an afternoon session at the start of the last decent onshore blow, which seems like a long time ago now.
The brightly coloured shallow running Mommotti 180 in ARB was ideal for the wild but sunny conditions.
A few more fish followed before the weed, stirred up by the wave action, made further fishing impossible....
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Here's a subject that divides people, as an experienced Bass Angler why would you pay for a guide? Well if you're at home you probably wouldn't, presuming you know your spots, state of tides, when & where to fish and when not to bother, but when you leave that area the local knowledge you have is very useful but maybe not quite as effective? If your time is limited its easy to waste a lot of time trying to locate the fish.
Further to the above here are some other reasons I look forward to going down to
Jim Hendrick in Wexford for some guided fishing.
Firstly
Safety, I can rely on Jim to make all the safety calls and just concentrate on the fishing, a big luxury in itself. I could be at the mouth of a huge estuary as the tide turns and about to flood on the biggest tide of the cycle with gullies behind me and fish right to within a safe margin of last orders by relying on Jim to know when that is and communicate it to me. There are a hundred other situations where the safety issue can apply also.
The numerous prime
Locations I have been taken to that I'd never have found myself, and will probably never find way back to, such is the maze of country lanes around our coastline.
Timings you will rarely beat a professional guide like Jim to consistently put you in the right spot at precisely the right times to give you a chance at the best fishing on offer that day. There are never any guarantees as any angler knows.
Transport another luxury, to be driven to location after location with zero navigation required and just be able to talk fishing with a hugely knowledgeable Guy, along with many other related and unrelated topics and to be able to sit in the car enjoy the countryside is just bliss, especially on the way back from a 10hr fishing day! When fishing with a professional guide you cannot fail to
Learn from the experience, knowledge that is hard won on your own that you can take away with you to be introduced to your own fishing at a later dateFinally, and most importantly, I find the whole experience
Hugely enjoyable catching or not and I hope I can continue to enjoy guided fishing for a few more years at least.
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I don't do much surface fishing in my local area so to arrive at a new spot and get hit on the first cast.......then the second......third and so on
up to about a dozen, with most hits resulting in landed fish, was a summer treat. The lure that worked in the flat calm clear water was the Smith
Zipsea Pop 08 (Clear)
until I'd bent the weak trebles straight too often and
switched lures, by which time the action had slowed down.
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The August issue of Irish Angler is out and contains the first of my three articles on fishing for Bass with soft plastics.
This month gives an overview along with how and why I started fishing with them.
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Photo by Padraig Fitzmaurice.Still catching here in Clare despite the changeable weather. Yesterday I returned to a spot I’ve called “The Flats”, with Padraig in lashing rain and a strong onshore wind. The water was soupy from the wild weather of the last few days but we fished anyway having made the effort to suit up and walk to the spot. To my total amazement I hooked this brute at close range, at first I thought it was a double but after measuring we decided to call it 9Lb, my best fish so far in 2011, which unbelievable for a day when we easily could not have bothered. A further smaller fish followed for me and Padraig hooked and lost a fish which put a good bend in his new rod. The lure that did the business again was the Daiwa shore line shiner SL17-F, the retrieve was very slow with plenty of stops. I think the motion of the bigger lure gave the fish a chance to locate it in the murky water.....
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Fishing Clare this week and finding the fish. In order to punch a lure into a stiff southerly breeze and fish the shallow mark I'm on I've been fishing almost exclusively with a
Daiwa Shore line shiner SL17F - INAKKO (Baby Mullet). Meeting up with local expert John Weir shortly for an evening session in some pretty foul weather.
