Metal Rocks!

Yesterday, after a night of being shouted at by my nine month old daughter Eva, I found myself in the car at 7am clutching a mug of tea with one thought on my mind, bass! After scraping the ice off the windscreen I had another thought on my mind, gloves, or rather my inability to locate a pair when I needed them. Heaters on full I headed down the A1 blasting myself awake with some nice, loud Fishbone and by the time I arrived at the mark my tiredness had been overtaken by the anxious excitement I always feel before I fish. I loaded my self up with my bass gear and my LRF gear and forgoing an extra jacket headed down to the mark.

It was cold but calm with a slight offshore wind and I went straight for my go to lure, a Lunker City Ribster in Arkansas Shiner mounted on a 10.5g #2/0 Football jighead. I began working the lure around the reef, bouncing  it along the sea bed as well as jigging and twitching it through open water. After about 45 minutes I swapped over to my LRF kit and rigged up a Lunker City Swimmin' Ribster on a 3g #2/0 jighead, to see if the added vibration of the paddle tail would illicit a response. I spent about half an hour working the lure through the current, allowing it to sink nose down waggling its tail before jigging it back up again to repeat the process, I had a couple of tentative bumps but nothing I could actually strike into. I then decided to try at range with a 30g Bombarda with an eight foot trace, rigged with a tiny pearl redgill. This was launched out a considerable distance then really slowly retrieved allowing the little weightless eel to flutter provocatively in the tide. I worked this set up for a while before I switched over to a silver Toby to see if some flash would work on the bass. Sure enough as I worked the lure back in the surface layers with a medium retrieve a bass hit the lure hard and everything went solid. The fish fought well for its size and kited about a bit as well as doing the usual bass surface splashing before it was landed! I was pleased with this bass as it had been frankly quite hard work to catch, especially as all my usual methods weren't doing the job.

Old school lures still rock!

A quick picture and I slipped the 41cm of silver back to the sea. I noticed that when it was landed it coughed up a tiny sandeeel of about 1" which would be perfectly matched by a Gulp! 1" Minnow.  I quickly reached into the rod holdall to grab the LRF gear in order to cash in on the feeding bass. It was at this point that disaster struck, in my haste to get the rod I had forgotten that it still had a lure attached and as I lifted it quickly out the hook found a juice box in the bag. I watched in a sort of dumb horror as the tip folded double then with a sad little crack parted company with the rest of the rod.

Bugger!

After 5 minutes of mourning I packed up and headed back as I was keen to order another tip section from Ben at Art of Fishing, which I hope will arrive soon as I am keen to get back to some LRF bass!

Tight lines, Schogsky.