Today is the last day of the show

• Yesterday was another really interesting day out here - it is not much use to spend all my time wandering around the show looking open-mouthed at all the kit on display. Granted, you could do this, and I did myself for the first few hours on Friday, but in truth I need to learn as much as possible.

• I have talked at length with one of the most respected and highly successful specialist shore anglers out here, and he is completely obsessed with fishing for bass. Kinda sounds like plenty of us does it not ? This particular person is using a rod no longer than about 8' for all his shore fishing, and very specifically the Tenryu Super Mix 240. I wanted to know why.....

• An angler like this guy wants a rod that can very easily switch from fishing more "conventional" hard plastic lures over to various soft plastics on either jig heads and or free swimming. Then he might go and put on a tiny 25g vertical jig, rigged with 1/0 assist hooks, and cast it close to one hundred metres and really search out huge areas of water by making this shiny piece of metal sink and flutter all the way in.

• So are there rods out here that can do this ? And bear in mind that they are very different bits of kit to the ultra-fast action rods that the French love to use for fishing with hard plastic lures - essentially the things we are most used to using. I am seeing a lot of companies out here who are launching lots of specialist "do it all very efficiently" bass rods that are used for both hard and soft plastics, and might stretch to a little bit of very light vertical jigging if required. You can easily buy individual rods that are designed purely for what I would now term the three different bass fishing methods out here (hard lures, soft plastics, and vertical jigging), but it is interesting to see the "crossover" rods.

• Tenryu without doubt is top of the three out here - the distinctly red rods are drawing big crowds all the time, and I see lots of guys walking around with red Tenryu rod bags that they have just bought. The Tenryu range is massive, and I want them all !! Dream on perhaps......

• The Tenryu Super Mix 210 (say 7'), 240' (8') and the 270 (9') are the all round, "cope with it all very well" rods, and they feel stunning to pick up and waggle. I already know of a fair few bass anglers from Jersey who are using these particular rods, and if there is one rod I would now buy to really get me into fishing with the mountain of soft plastics available, it is going to be the Super Mix 240. Better get saving !! The shore guy was talking me through the reasons behind the Super Mix 240 specifically, and I could really see exactly what he was getting at.

• But there are also plenty of awesome cheaper bass rods out here that will do the crossover style really well - I have talked a lot with the guys over at Sakura and Hart specifically, and there are some outstanding bits of kit for sensible money. The popular lengths for a rod that can do it all are without doubt 7', 8' and 9'. Bearing in mind of course that a lot of the bass anglers are fishing from boats of course, but around 8' seems to be the most popular length for this kind of rod, for both shore and boat work.

• There are also loads of more regular spinning rods out here, but what in the UK I would now term "specialist bass plugging", the French anglers call spinning for bass - this is using more regular hard plastic lures like the ones we all love. Surface, sub surface, stick baits, wanderers, you name it, bass love 'em. So a "more regular spinning rods" out here is generally lightening quick to use.

• Spinning (or plugging) rods out here are virtually all very fast action and seriously light. Gorgeous bits of kit at plenty of different price ranges, but you can see how the French bass anglers have so wholeheartedly embraced the fact that fast rods are far more efficient at working hard plastic lures from boat and shore. The length of rods range from 10' down to 7', and I have not seen a lure rod for bass yet that is over 10' long, and you can see that guys are more than happy to fish with the shorter rods. My own Tenryu Red Dragon Express is close to 10', and it is the most incredible rod to fish with, but I have to say that I would fish with a 9' specialist plugging rod off the shore with no worries at all. The Rod Bar 270 comes to mind.

• Anyway, lots more to think about. Time now to go and get some coffee and wake Trevor up who is sleeping (and snoring) in the bed next to me - nice !! I am flying back to the UK tonight, and I am so glad I came out here. It is the lads from Jersey that I know who first told me that I had to come to this show, and I owe them another debt of thanks for switching me on to this stuff.

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......