John Bailey – The Kingfisher Diaries
October 6th 2009
Beautiful Bass
One great bonus of staying at the Kingfisher apartments is that just twenty-five minutes to the north of you there is some of the best bass fishing in the British Isles. Take an area of coastline from Hunstanton in west to Cromer in the East and you've got miles of stunning bass beach.
If you're coming to Kingfisher, you're probably a coarse angler but that shouldn't put you off bass fishing. You can use your normal lure gear for this entrancing species. All you've got to do is make sure you wash it down in warm water afterwards to remove traces of salt.
Lure fishing is probably the most active, most efficient, most entertaining way to pick up sea bass. Any lure that looks and behave like a long, silver sand eel should prove a winner. Keep on the move, keep casting, keep looking for surface activity, keep looking for rocks, wrecks, tidal rips, anything that differentiates one piece of ocean from the other and there you will find the bass.
And the good thing is the bass season these days, is increasingly drawn out into the autumn. There are lots of people that would say that October is the best month of all, especially if we maintain fairly settled conditions and not too many night frosts.
So get yourself up here. The morning you can spend fishing for tench and the afternoon and evening - always the best time for bass - you can spend on the coast. What a great day. Pop into one of the coastal inns like The White Horse after your session, have a meal, a pint and swap stories.
A final thought. Tempting as it is to see that bass on a plate put them back, eh? Bass, like everything in this pressured world of ours, need a break. We're fishermen not fishmongers after all.