Scaling Down & Learning

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As an obsessed angler who has pretty much dropped all types of fishing except lure fishing since 2016 and someone who also seems to keep moving house & location, I’ve often had to adapt and learn quickly to keep catching fish under different circumstances.

The key thing I think a lot of ‘lerfers’ understand/learn straight away, is that scaling down (responsibly) increases your chances of catching a fish in general, so I won’t bang on about that too much. But instead, what I’d really like to talk about is how scaling down has provided me the opportunity to learn and improve the rest of my fishing too

To start I’ll talk about my favourite type of lure fishing which has to be hunting out bigger bass.

I must have spent almost 2 years trying to but not catching bass at all when I first switched over to lures. I was using big lures on just about every venue I knew but when I look back I was really wasting a lot of time fishing with little knowledge which I would later start to collect. Having spent several years now withfishing lighter tackle (0-7g rated) targeting bass’s freshwater cousins (perch) and also catching a fair few schoolies on LRF gear I was able to start experimenting with different patterns, lures, rigs, tide times etc as I grew in confidence and experience and gradually got to understand the feeding habits of bass a lot better and of course this enabled me to catch more fish. A particular highlight for me was on the eve before the first Big Lerf Fundraiser where Wayne Taylor and I were fishing 3 & 5g metals from the beach and casting into groups of schoaling mullet and picking out bass. A method I now have unbelievable faith in.

Then last year after another house move, I was relocated to somewhere I was confident held bigger bass and so switched back to larger lure rods and lures designed to pick out the bigger fish and of course I was constantly thinking about the lessons I had learned whilst lerfing for the smaller quarry:

First & last light and into darkness, 2 hours either side of the high and low tides (venue depending of course), fishing on the drop and being ready to strike, fishing through the schoals of mullet etc.

Of course the location I had moved too held fish which was a big point of contention but I really believe the lessons learned helped massively in what was my best season bass fishing with well over 50 bass picked up in about 20 sessions and several really good sized fish.

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Next for me is flatfish and something I had never targeted on lures before the start of recent Big Lerf winter league. I was shown to a well know spot to find flounder and revisited several times during the winter playing with different methods to pick them out and managed them every time I think. But what I learned in scaling down to catch these much smaller flounder than I had seen before was that certain approaches seemed to pick out the slightly bigger fish and for me I found the jighead did the trick on this venue. Then when fishing another marina later in the same competition which was well known for bigger flatfish, I was able to pick out a much bigger specimen by going back to the jighead where I would have normally stayed with a snooded dropshot.

So whilst LRF is 100% worthwhile fishing for its own merits with its fast growing array of tackle and methods to target ridiculous amounts of weird and wonderful species, I think it also is a fantastic way to broaden your thinking and it provides ample opportunities to learn about how to trick fish in general which you can take away to improve your other fishing methods.