Catch fish with Mike Ladle.

Catch Fish with
Mike Ladle

"HOME."

Information Page

SEA FISHING

For anyone unfamiliar with the site always check the FRESHWATER, SALTWATER and TACK-TICS pages. The Saltwater page now extends back as a record of over several years of (mostly) sea fishing and may be a useful guide as to when to fish. The Freshwater stuff is also up to date now. I keep adding to both. These pages are effectively my diary and the latest will usually be about fishing in the previous day or two. As you see I also add the odd piece from my friends and correspondents if I've not been doing much. The Tactics pages which are chiefly 'how I do it' plus a bit of science are also updated regularly and (I think) worth a read (the earlier ones are mostly tackle and 'how to do it' stuff).

Bass on lures

As I said in yesterday's BLOG page I've been having a thin time with the bass lately. However, this doesn't mean that there are none about - just that I can't catch them. In contrast my pal Bill, who is dead keen on his lure fishing, has recently had a couple of interesting sessions down at the coast so I’ll give his descriptions (slightly edited by me) to show how it’s been recently. Here's what he says:-

I was a bit reluctant to tramp along the shore to one of the less accessible spots. Windguru said ‘0.8m wave’ (generally too rough for where I had in mind) but Magic Seaweed said 1ft wave which would be OK. So I went. As it turned out Magic Seaweed was the more accurate forecast of the two on the day.

As I yomped along the rocks at 06:45 I saw two tailing bass, not big ones but worth a chuck so I tried to get them to take a Slug-Gill/Evo Stix but I couldn't tempt them.

Then the rain started and it was so humid that I was half expecting thunder. I had one fish within the first hour then wandered along another mile or so. It was a big tide so there wasn’t much beach but I had three more fish from a stretch of shingle and one from the boulders on my way back. I finished off with one final bass half-an-hour before I packed in at 11:30. All the fish were schoolies of between one and two pounds except for the best one which weighed about three. The first five fish all took on a flooding tide.

Bill says it was his best session so far this year and (of course) would have been even better if the fish were bigger. A couple of days later he decided to have another go, this time accompanied by his pal Mike (another Mike).

This session started wet, in fact it rained for the first two hours and was hot, humid & foggy. The sea was as calm as it can get. This time there were loads of fish visible throughout the day, mainly mullet but I'm sure I could see bass feeding in the shallow calm water early on. Once again we had six bass (all tiddlers as Bill says). Two of them were less than 0.5lb and the best this time was about a couple of pounds. On this trip four of the fish took a Feed Shallow plug, we had one on a Sasuke 140 and the last one took an Evo Stix Redgill.

Altogether it was 15 man-hours of spinning for the twelve small bass. Seven of the fish took weedless waggy tails and five took hard bodied plugs so the lure didn't seem to make much difference. No doubt they missed quite a few bites so it was pretty entertaining fishing overall. I must get down to the coast again soon!

This is my advert for the book I wrote with Steve Pitts - just in case. Even if you don’t buy “The Second Wave” yourself – please tell your facebook, twitter, email, friends about its existence. As I’ve said IT'S AVAILABLE ON PAPER OR FOR YOUR KINDLE FROM - "Veals Mail Order" and from Amazon "Amazon"

If you have any comments or questions about fish, methods, tactics or 'what have you!' get in touch with me by sending an E-MAIL to - docladle@hotmail.com

Small one on an Evo Stix.

Ditto.

Ditto.

...and one on a hard plastic.

Mike with a small fish.

A final bass on the weedless Evo Stix.