Bass fishing - the future ?

• How on earth can such a seemingly simple bit of soft plastic like you can see above create such wanton desire among so many bass anglers ? A modern soft plastic lure like the MegaBass XLayer is to the untrained eye probably no more than a slightly dubious looking ribbed bit of strange rubber, but in the hands of a decent bass fisherman this thing comes alive. Watching the French guys demonstrating various hard and soft lures in the tanks was a real eye-opener. The XLayer for example is designed to be worked in slower tides, with a jig head roughly the shape of the one you can see above. You then literally make it jump and twitch up and down as you retrieve it. Kind of like the guys were using them when I was last over in Ireland in fact - and the bass were nailed big time. See the photos here.

• You need to be able to impart such subtle movements and twitches to these things, and the more information that is literally transmitted down the rod and through your hand and arm will mean more bass caught. Might sound like rubbish, but it's true. That is why I a starting to save up for the red Tenryu Super Mix 240. The right tool for the job.

• By no means am I am now saying that the only people who really know how to catch bass are the French, because that's rubbish. I know some pretty good bass anglers myself who can smash the fish big time. But on a personal level I like to learn all the time. I don't like standing still. The French are doing a lot of different things to us, and it fascinates me.

• The lure you can see above is one of the best looking hard plastic lures I have ever seen - the picture of it does no justice to the overall shape and appeal of this thing, but when I saw this IMA Imagene 130 sitting in a glass stand at the Nantes show, my eyes nearly popped out of my head. This is a shallow diving lure that is designed to worked fairly fast, much like the Maria Chase BW, the Tackle House Feed Shallow and the various Duo Tide Minnow lures, the IMA Imagene will soon be in my tackle box, and specifically in the colour you can see above. A top-end Japanese lure like this does not come cheap, and they can be really hard to get hold of, but I know that in a while you will be able to get them right here. Ask and ye shall receive !! (after abusing your credit card of course) I have heard such good reports about IMA lures, and there is also a slightly smaller 110 model of this one that swims even shallower. Not that I like lures or anything.......

• I had an email from my mate Cato over in Norway, and he caught a 17lb coalfish the other day when he was out ice fishing. That is some fish to catch off the shore !! A guy he knows was ice fishing last week and caught an 80lb ling - yes, you read it right, eighty pounds. Not off the boat, off the shore. OK, off the ice then. Wow. They have got some incredible fishing up in Norway. Cold but insane. Check out Cato's awesome drumming on this life-changing metal album here.

Can't sleep - some more French bass thoughts

• My head is swimming with an information overload out here, and with all that going on I woke up at silly o'clock again. Kinda feels like being out on repeated night fishing sessions again. Only a few hours now until the Nantes show starts again, and today I am going to try and learn a whole load more than I did yesterday.

• I wanted to try and find a principal reason why French bass fishing has become so technically advanced. Fishing trends and markets are driven by different things, but there had to be a reason to explain the explosion out here in fishing modern soft plastic lures generally close to or on the bottom, plus the increasing acceptance of vertical jgging as a killer method for the bass in deeper water.

• The main reason I have found for all this modernisation is that there are literally so many French bass anglers continuously casting "conventional" hard plastic surface and sub-surface lures at the fish that the bass are basically getting spooked and moving out from inshore and are congregating more and more in the deeper, often very turbulent water. Fishing for bass is huge out here, indeed I was quoted figures yesterday that at least 50% of French sea anglers are active bass anglers. And bear in mind that sea fishing is really big out here.

• Of course there can be some excellent shore fishing out here if you know where to look and can get away from the crowds (the same the world over with all kinds of fishing), but it is far more of a boat-based bass culture in France than it is in England. The guys are using these generally smaller, faster boats (loads of RIBs, perfect for fishing close to rocks and rips) to access the deeper water often way offshore - but bear in mind that a lot of the west coast of France is littered with islands and rocks that give so much varied bass water for the boat angler. Many of these offshore islands are where the keen shore fishermen go as well.

• So the French anglers have had no choice but to keep developing more and more refined techniques and gear to catch these fish. The guys seem very happy with the actual numbers of bass or stock levels that they have around here, but they are being forced to literally "adapt or die". Either learn new methods or suffer a drastic reduction in your fishing returns. This is a very interesting philosophy to find so close to home on the saltwater fishing side.

• It goes almost without saying that the range of what we would call hard plastic lures is about as refined as I have ever come across - more "please buy me" shallow diving and surface lures than you could believe, and I want to own them all, in all the different colours as well !! There is some stunning new stuff from brands such as Sebile, IMA, Tackle House, Duo, ILLEX etc. I watched a new Duo lure being demonstrated yesterday and had to stop my mouth opening all the time in a really intelligent "hang dog" look - the lure was insane, and the guy working it simply made it come alive. I was gobsmacked at how slowly and deliberately the guys fish some of their hard plastic lures. OK, so there is plenty of stuff that likes to be cranked hard and fast, but there is some really interesting stuff that likes to be worked closer to how you might work a soft plastic lure like the MegasBass XLayer or the Slug-Go.

• And on the soft plastics front, this is what I find most staggering out here. I said earlier that the bass are tending to vacate the more pressurised inshore areas, and the guys are often having to fish deeper water to catch them. It is how they might fish say twenty to forty metres down that is really opening my eyes. The amount of different kinds of soft plastics (worms, shads, minnows etc.) and the variation in jig head weights, shapes and patterns is what has got into my head big time. Watching these soft lures being properly demonstrated in the tanks is blowing my mind. The lures look better than the real thing, seriously. I know we can use a lot of these methods in our waters, from boat and shore.

• I was talking with a really well respected bass angler out here yesterday, and he was talking me through a specific soft plastic lure that was being demonstrated. It was a kind of worm, fished on a tungsten weighted jig head. The best results they get from this particular lure is to let it sink to the bottom in a bit of tide and literally allow it to sit there, nose down, while the body of the soft worm literally shivers and flutters in the tide. From time to time they will move it a bit, and these movements practically had me jumping into the tank to grab the lure myself. Even in a tank with no current you could see what was going on when the lure sat nose down, and the angler said the hits off the bass could be off the scale savage on the static worm. I am often guilty of cranking my lures too fast (too overexcited half the time), but these methods the French are using often require huge finesse, patience and skill.

• I have been showing a few prints of my bass photographs to various people out here, and the reactions are fantastically positive. We might be lagging behind the French when it comes to modern bass fishing techniques (and we are, there is no point trying to stick one's chest out and deny it), but they really like the way we photograph and film our fishing. Interesting. Time to go and find some coffee......