The tug is very much the drug for me with this whole lure fishing thing, but yesterday evening I got one of those slightly different tugs, and it kinda makes me giggle when I think about what I felt and what the fish seemed to be trying to do. My mate Andy made the call on where to fish and I liked his idea very much when we turned up and found some pretty good looking conditions. We didn’t clean up, but I dropped an okay fish at my feet and we both got a couple of bumps through fishing paddletails in close and around the swirling water. What really made my evening though was the lack of weed ..read more

I know what some of you are going to say here - Henry, why not just use your mobile phone? If I had my way they wouldn’t be called mobile phones, because however useful they are for any number of different reasons, most of the time when I go out fishing I don’t get a usable mobile signal. Let’s park that one then before we get going today…………… I first properly came across walkie-talkies or two-way radios when I used to be involved in making some TV programmes about fishing. My director would hand me a walkie-talkie to communicate with him when we were doing those drive-by shots - basically me ..read more

Hear me out here because thinking about this helped get “power” through my 10k run early yesterday morning! Let’s say you have fished a spot a few times. You might have got to know it okay and caught a bunch of fish. You like the ground but it isn’t a spot you rush back to time after time because for whatever reason you haven’t quite fully appreciated what is actually there. Then at some point further down the road you sort of end up “re-seeing” the mark, or re-evaluating the ground and realising that it’s actually some frigging awesome terrain and you seriously need to be fishing it more ..read more

Whilst I am struggling to fish with anything other than the more powerful Favorite Black Swan 852H 8'5'' 16-56g lure rod which I reviewed the other day, it obviously goes without saying that however versatile that rod actually is - and it truly is - a lot of shore based bass anglers simply aren’t going to go for a lure rod which has a high end casting weight of 56g. I am not privy to any tackle company’s sales figures, but I have always assumed the lure rods which lie somewhere in the region of say 5-35g are the most popular. This obviously matches the fact that most lures we might bass fish w ..read more

Breathable chest waders (BCWs) remain an essential part of my fishing and working in fishing, and whilst nothing has changed about how much I like the very good £250+ Vision Koski BCWs, I’d be daft not to register a good bit of interest in some new BCWs which are retailing for well under the £200 mark. I hesitate to call an item of fishing tackle around this price as cheap, but I can’t function without BCWs and I am going to spend what it takes to keep fishing in them. Yep, all BCWs are going to fail at some point via saltwater use especially so I accept that in some respects they are a dispos ..read more

And just like that we came off the rocks yesterday evening and my guiding stint for July is done. I am going to nip out for a run this morning before saying goodbye to our anglers and then packing my Epic Berlingo up and driving across Ireland to stay with a friend tonight. Early Saturday morning I head for the ferry at Rosslare, hopefully pick up some sort of wi-fi to be able to listen to England v New Zealand on the radio, then drive through Wales and back home to Cornwall. I have one evening with my awesome wife before she then heads to France for a week because she’s leading a school trip ..read more

One of the lads in our second group had never caught a bass from the shore before, but on the first morning of his trip with us he went and landed this stunner below - and then he caught a whole heap more. All on the Savage Gear Sandeel Pencil 125. I changed another of our lads over to the cotton candy Sandeel Pencil 125 on the first morning and he literally landed bass after bass and it such fun to watch and then help grab and unhook the fish…………… We found calmer conditions than we hoped to find yesterday morning, but we have got so much ground out here to go looking for fish. Eventually we ..read more

By the time this blog post goes up we will be out fishing with our second group of anglers out here in Kerry, SW Ireland. Our first group left yesterday morning after four days of chasing around for bass, and we had a blast. When the fishing was on it was really good, and when it was tough we kept working at it. There is no getting away from the fact that the bass fishing is up and down at the moment, and I am finding that back home as well. I am not remotely ignoring the pressure that bass stocks are under from the various “interests”, but what is the most noticeable to me so far this year is ..read more

If I get to review a better lure rod than this one in 2024 I will be gobsmacked. You might not think that you need or want a lure rod for your bass fishing with this much (easily accessible) power, but if there was a ever a lure fishing rod where the rating didn’t tell even half the story then this Favorite Black Swan 852H 8'5'' 16-56g is that rod. The fact that you can buy this rod for £289.99 here in the UK is quite frankly a steal, because with the technology that has gone into it - Japanese Toray T1100G carbon for starters - and how ridiculously wand-like and utterly delightful it is to fi ..read more

Flying back from Halifax on the east coast of Canada to Heathrow on Sunday was a shorter flight than it is to depart from Halifax and fly across Canada to Vancouver on the west coast. The scale of a country like Canada is hard to get your head around, indeed having had the amazing experience of a few days of striped bass fishing in one tiny area of such a vast country, in many respects it has fried my brain even more because of the endless possibilities there are……………. Now that I am back home I feel more able to be a bit more clinical with my perspective on the week. For sure we had some incr ..read more