‘Over thinking-winter purchases’

I’ll be straight. Writing a few words on one fish in an otherwise tough days fishing is a tough sell. If you chance upon Facebook now and again you may well have seen a picture of a reasonable-to-modest Wrasse and read no further. That’s fine. Should you choose to read on then I’m about to tell you something you already know so you, too may  decide to avert you eyes. For those that remain (thanks) imagine if you will the cabin fever brought on by 4 months of lure fishing inactivity. Not nice is it. Since the end of November I can count the number of casts made on one hand. In years past I would’ve loaded up the van and hit the A34 at every opportunity over the winter to get my lure fix and bother as many Perch as I could but it just hasn’t happened this winter for one reason or another and all that latent lure fishing festers and boils and leads to strange thoughts. Fast forward to the Easter weekend and with a good forecast I’m ready to go like a coiled spring. I’ve got some proper gear in my bag. The sort of stuff your mates swoon over. Japanese import plastics, new rod & reel combos, ideas on reinventing lure presentation. I’m like that fella that makes the electric cars, the good ones. Clive Sinclair? I’m buzzing.
Anyway you can guess that several hours into a day aboard Adam Kirby’s boat I’m blanking spectacularly well. I’d had one ‘deffo’ bite all day and as a result I am slagging the sea and all that resides within. It’s not like my mates are catching either (that would be even worse) and I can ‘borrow’ their method. To compound matters the excellent electronics aboard are showing us fish and I have to remind myself that as great as modern fishfinders are with the 3D and the down scan and the WiFi networks they only tell us what we are NOT catching not what we will catch. That said Chris did get a slow jig expertly close enough to a Pollacks mouth that we could call it fair and square but judging by the screens we did well not to foul hook a fish every drop!
So what do we do? Well, we anchor up, drop  the rods, make some tea and gather our collective thought remembering that we hadn’t really seen each other for a while so had some non-fishing stuff to catch up on.
It’s here where the penny drops and as the tide eases and the cups run dry I get myself together. I posted online in the week that there are many wasted hours spent on trying to make fish take what the angler wants them to take and not what the fish wants. I heeded my own advice. As the tide eased on a favourite Wrasse spot what was clear was that these fish wanted slow, easy prey. I may have wanted fish to hit my new twin-tail Japanese prawn/shrimp imitations or my impressive range of 10-20g slow jigs but, in fact, it was predictably the good old TRD on a Cheb rig. Nothing fancy, just trickling the 10g head along the bottom nice and slow with no action at all other than occasionally pulling it clear of a snag. As it’s rigged so that the hook and lure can move freely the lure can act a bit more naturally, that’s what I think anyway. One hit and one fish later we’ve measured a nice looking 47cm Ballan and taken it’s picture and I’m quietly satisfied with myself. Not because I’ve caught (it helps though) but that I’ve reminded myself that cabin fever induces over complication. It’s better to know how to fish 5 lures well than 50 lures poorly and if I know something it’s that a TRD on a Cheb’ will always, ALWAYS get me a take on a slow day. I’ll let you know how I’m Prawny/Shrimpy things work out but if I had to predict I’d say they will end up in the drawer marked ‘Over thinking-winter purchases’