Boat fishing

Bass fishing tips

Bass fishing is a dark art. You can go every week in your boat loaded to the gunnels with livebait, deadbait, and every kind of rubber eel and never catch one! (believe me I have been there)

We set out at the start of September with the intention of catching a few. Before the trip I read just about every bass fishing tip in all the magazines I have.

We set out for a sandbank as apparently bass shoal around them gorging themselves on mackerel at this time of year. This picture shows the conditions, really fine weather. Sandbanks are easy to fish, you never get snagged and the concept is simple, you just motor the boat to one end and then drift across the bank with the tide. As you leave the bank you do it all again!

You can find sandbanks on the marine charts, they are easy to spot. A gps plotter is then essential to  find them combined with the use of the fishfinder to spot the banks perimeter before you start fishing. The best fishing lies at the end away from the tide. But we have caught them all over the bank.

So we rigged up some shrimp feathers these are the smallest feathers you will find in the tackle shop,  according to the magazines this is how you catch sandeel. We caught plenty of small joey mackerel and chucked them in the livebait well. Then we had a little run of sandeel, this was a first - we have never caught sandeel before! The magazine was right!

We didnt bother to fill the baitwell we just had four sandeels and four small mackerel, and we rigged two rods with 3oz lead a plastic boom and about a 8ft length of leader to a small carp hook. On one rod we fished a mackerel and on another a sandeel. You drop to the bottom and wind up about three turns so I guess you are about a metre off bottom. As you drift you keep checking this.

We fished for approx half an hour when bang the rod went, no fish but the mackerel came back minus  its body, thats a hell of a poweful fish! Then a while later the sandeel rod went, the sandeel gets lively when a bass comes around so you see it twitch a bit more than usual, then the rod starts to bend, tis almost like when you snag the bottom when drifting, the line pulls away. You dont strike, you just lift in to the fish to get the hook set and up comes a lovely bass of about 2.5lb!

Which Bass Bait is Best?

I used to do alot of fly fishing, and when you catch your first fish of the day, you open it up and see what its been eating. This helps you match your fly to the real food the trout has eaten.

This week I tried this trick on the first bass of the day, interestingly I caught it on a live sandeel. But when I opened it up all it had in its stomach were tiny crabs. I have placed a sandeel in the picture to help with the scale, its not a big one at all - maybe 4-5 inches tops. Please excuse the guts!

This begs the question that if the fly fishing trick works (and it does) then the the best bait for bass should be small crabs, and has got me thinking about maybe a trace like mackerel feathers each with a tiny crab on it. I'll have to try it!

Gower Bass Season starts with a bang!

Some local boats are reporting bass off the gower coast, we had a particularly good session last weekend witha a total of 34 fish being brought aboard in a 5 hour session. Only four were kept the largest or which was just over 5lb. The average size of the bass was 1-2lb.

All fell to live sandeel. The first pound of live eels of the season - maybe they were lucky? Infact we only stopped catching when we ran out of eels, it was one fish one eel! Almost every drift we had fish and it didnt really stop at any state of the tide.

Not many bass days like that to be had, but local knowledge of the marks seems to be the key, as many anglers we talked to on our return seemed to be returning empty handed!