Bass - Quality over quantity

lastworm · December 11, 2022

After being a surface addict for so many years, I've recently started getting into fishing with divers for bass - especially in the system I fish where they are prolific and I tend to more smaller fish. Someone told me fish fight a lot harder on sub surface presentations, which I now know to be true based on recent experience.

I went down to my local yesterday to sneak in a few hours on the water, started just after 2pm (not peak bite time by any means) and as usual was fishing surface from the get-go. After about an hour and not a single bit of interest I decided to throw on a Daiwa Spike, which has been getting me good results lately in terms of numbers. I was fishing a steep muddy bank covered in root balls and got completely cleaned up by something big, I fought it for about 5 seconds, before tightening the drag and it snapped me clean off in the middle of my leader. Brand new Spike - gone. This convinced me to throw on another and keep fishing.

I went all the way to the top of the system and got a smallish fish of around 26 fork length, turned back and started casting near a rocky cave that has never produced a fish, Had a huge take, fish went deep and was doing figure 8's around the Kayak, I thought I'd hooked a big carp. Fight went on for a few minutes before I had a chance to see the fish, nice big bronze bass. It took another few runs before I managed to get it in the net.

Fish was in amazing condition and every bit of 36cm to the fork but it was difficult to get a good measure in the yak, the down side to fishing on your own is your photos are always ordinary....