‘..its variety of forms in loughs and bays and gulfs and bights and guts and lagoons and atolls and archipelagos and sounds and fjords and minches and tidal estuaries and arms of sea: its solidity in glaciers, icebergs, icefloes: its docility in working hydraulic millwheels, turbines, dynamos, electric power stations, bleachworks, tanneries, scutchmills: its utility in canals, rivers, if navigable, floating and graving docks: its potentiality derivable from harnessed tides or watercourses falling from level to level: its submarine fauna and flora (anacoustic, photophobe) numerically, if not literally, the inhabitants of the globe: its ubiquity as constituting 90% of the human body: the noxiousness of its effluvia in lacustrine marshes, pestilential fens, faded flowerwater, stagnant pools in the waning moon’

James Joyce – Ulysses

I met a man once, fished with him even, he wrote of good places! The bass fishing world has changed.

So you run and you run to catch up with the sun but it’s sinking racing around to come up behind you again. Pink Floyd – Time

Today is June 14 2012. In two days time my tenth season for bass guiding begins on this coast, I will be guiding Jean Yves, a long-term customer and now a good friend. This is Jean Yves’ fourth year of bass fishing on the Southern coasts of Ireland.

Jean Yves first fished for bass in Wexford during 2004. During his fishing over those years its inevitable that he has drawn comparisons to his previous experiences. These comparisons and insights let me know what my customer witnesses and feels and this in turn helps me to improve that experience. Sometimes that’s not possible, things change!

Providing something that a customer feels he would like to return to makes good business sense. It makes running the business a little easier, if I can easily encourage customers to return I don’t need to spend time looking for new ones. It also places me in positions where I am working with people whom I know and trust. The customer knows what to expect and the way we can work together, an Irish fishing experience!

About 67% of my customer base is recurring – customers don’t always have positive experiences or indeed return again, and I often find its what people bring with them to their guided fishing or workshop days that will work for or against us. That customer base is always evolving and over time new customers arrive and older customers evolve to become friends! Friends don’t make good business sense but I wouldn’t change any of them!

The business and its operation is limited and I have always accepted those limits, plugged those constraints into the business model so to speak. The limits of the fishery allow it to be what it is. This is what you have to work with. The truth. After ten years of experiences under these challenges you grow to accept the patterns of nature, the highs and lows of the fishing, twiddling your thumbs during the close, the delight, the excitement, the anticipation, the tough drudgery, the beginning and the end of the week, the season!

There is much ‘talk’ of expansive changes in bass fishing in this country at this time, talk of licences, extending the closed season, making it a catch and release period, increasing size limits, decreasing daily allowable catch. Some of this makes sense to me, I probably have posted here about a lot of those things over the years. Change can be good of course, if communicated and shared properly and is seen to be widely agreed with and supported.

Provided the change is based in valid experiences over time, a sense of involvement with participation and contributions from many different people, and with a good supporting knowledge base then change could be of benefit to the bass fishery.

But suggesting or even making change for change sake or because its a trendy topic to talk about or because it seems to appear to benefit economically then this of course is a different type of issue. This is especially true if its not transparent as to how or why change should be made. There are many wider contributing factors at stake that ultimately support the fishery that are equally as viably important and ‘economical’.

These factors will ‘pay off’ over a far longer period of time, the long haul – these need to be considered in the mix.

Development of the bass fishery does not need a ‘slam dunk’ approach at this time. We have all seen and experienced what this type of development means in this country, and what has that achieved? A change for change sake because it benefits through the perceived rationale of short term economics may in the longer term not prove to be beneficial to the resource at all – why shoot the goose if the goose can lay eggs for many years?

This is a copy of the regular newsletter as posted by Justin Anwyl who has worked as a bass fishing guide in Chichester Hbr for the past ten years.

To all those caught by the fly…

This year so far has been a tale of two halves as the very clement weather in March saw water temperatures get to 11.8 degrees and well above average for that time of year, only to be stalled in April where they sat for nearly a month between 10 and 11 degrees. We didn’t manage to hook a Bass in April due to the poor conditions and even throughout early May it felt like winter.

The good news is that the Solent has rocketed in the last 2 weeks by 4 degrees and is now above the magical 14-15 level. Bait is everywhere and school Bass can be seen on nearly every piece of structure you go past. The stock looks healthy enough but so far we are hooking up to year class 6, 7 and 8 with plenty of fish but no trophies to date (300 in the last three days).

A Solent Blitz

Cockroach patterns have been isolating the Bass from the Mackerel, but small red and white as well as olive Clouser Minnows reflect the size of the bait so far this season. Sandeel and small mullet fry are covering the whole of Hayling bay and very large blitzes are seen in the very early morning on the west side of the harbour, this bite is over by 7.30-8.00am as the sun breaks through. The same bite can be seen in the late evening when the thermal pressure drops and the sun comes off its vertical position.

Hopefully as the season gets into full swing the areas we cover will become better populated with quality Bass but I have heard from many sources of the damage been done East of Chichester throughout the Kingmere reef system where pair trawling has been operating since Christmas. This area is particularly important for both spawning Black Bream and Bass and the greatest fear is the physical damage being done to the reef itself – it is beyond me to understand how such an important area can be subject to such abuse especially during late winter when both species are shoaling and easily targeted – the Bass will have been feeding over white ragworm for months and have no commercial value when brought to port – they wouldn’t even cover the diesel expenditure –

Sussex Fisheries (Chief Fishery Officer and Clerk: Mr T.M. Dapling M.Sc.tel: 01273 454407 Fax: 01273 454408 email: admin@sussex-sfc.gov.uk) are aware of this problem but are moving way too slowly for my liking – case study the Eastern Seaboard for a template and start to take control of a resource which is everybody’s to enjoy.