So October has been pretty quiet but I haven’t managed to get out as much as I was hoping. I have been getting out locally for the odd hour here and there when I can and have mainly just been catching small fish but one night I lost a fish that I reckon was the fish I have been waiting for…

We where getting quiet a few small fish, from 0.5lb to 1.5lb and lots of small taps that you just couldn’t connect with. First thoughts where probably Mackeral but we where catching the odd tiny Bass around half a pound and maybe it was just full of them.

The water was a bit shallower than I like here and after catching the bottom a couple of times I decided to change lure to a Dichoso 5” paddler in white that I had mounted on a 7gm 2/0 weedless jighead. Now the lure is made of a really soft material and comes with slits in the top and bottom of the lure for weedless rigging. The jighead though didn’t have the deepest hook and looking at it you wouldn’t have believed you would ever hook up but with the material being so soft and with the slits it didn’t look too bad…

I got the classic little tap just like all the other bites but this one connected when I hit it… Instant weight and the fish took a couple slow powerful runs and started to kite towards a snag. All I did was apply some gentle pressure as the weight on the end felt like something serious. You know when your rods bent double and it just doesn’t feel like you can pull any harder… that was it, the fish just kitted one way and then slowly the next as I just kept trying to drag it in. I had chosen not to turn my headtorch in case I spooked the fish and being on a small area of beach I thought it would be a pretty simple to beach the fish. This ma have been where I pushed it a little bit too far and as the fish was only a metre or so out in a foot of water, she turned and shook her head in anger… the lure came flying out of her mouth and nearly hit me in the face… I couldn’t believe it and I reckon that was the fish I had been needing all year, so close and yet gone in a second! I can only blame the weedless hook and my stupidity for believing that it would have been alright… I guess it just wasn’t and it was just a classic case of bad angling.

Andy casting at another mark, it was perfect looking conditions but not a sniff!

I was lucky enough to get a day off work, something that I don’t think has happened at all this year apart from my only holiday in Cambodia… I had set a plan to get out in search of some new marks where I knew there was some fish and a chance of a good one too.