1 / 2

Scaling Down & Learning

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.  

---

2 / 2

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.

When life hits me the hardest, I go fishing.
I remember in detail one of the roughest arguments of my failed marriage. It was the day before my birthday in 2019 and I genuinely can’t remember many moments in my life where I felt lower. It was late evening and at the time I didn’t really know that lure fishing at night for freshwater predators was a possibility, but I needed to do something to take my mind somewhere out of its own darkness.
Not everyone is as lucky as I am to have become conditioned through repetition and training to automatically reach for a fishing rod when life gets tough. So, I’m forever grateful to my little brother Kyle for getting me to take him fishing back when I was about 16 or 17 years old. Another day I remember in detail. Catching wrasse, pollock, gobies and blennies on floated ragworms between the boulders of one of my hometown marks. 18 years later and I now think about fishing more than most men think about sex. I swear it! It consumes me.
So, on that horrendous night as I stormed out of the house in tears I turned right out of the house on autopilot towards my garage. I grabbed a 0.5-7g LRF fishing rod, and a lure bag which was always ready to go with a selection of small lures as well as the tools, net and mat I would need to manage any fish I might catch. I started walking in the opposite direction of my local canal which was my go-to venue at the time and instead marched to a nearby stream, a section of the upper Surrey Blackwater River which I had obsessed over since I first saw it about a year before. Hardly any water at all, snags everywhere including a bike and a shopping trolley as well as fallen branches and rocks, a spot most people wouldn’t even consider fishing.

But I had seen chub here before, and on previous daytime sessions I’d skimmed a 0.5g jig head and a 1-inch paddletail lure across the surface catching the cutest little perch again and again. But I’d still to the day never had a chub on a lure despite days and weeks trying on another small river in Surbiton the year before and countless sessions on different stretches of this river in daytime.
I’m pretty sure my lure of choice on this night was a Gunki tipsy S paddle tail (I think its about 1.5 inches long) which will have definitely have been mounted on an Ecogear shirazu jighead weighted at 0.5g and my method was simple flick diagonally up stream across to the far side of the river/stream and then briskly wind the lure on a straight retrieve across the surface towards myself keeping the lure as close to the surface as possible to avoid the snags.
Withing seconds of arriving, all my domestic trouble had been purged from my brain. I don’t know if you understand or believe this completely but when I fish, I am able to literally switch off everything else in my life and be completely present in that moment. I don’t even try, it just happens. I tune in to sounds, movement, my own breathing and everything else in my life just goes on pause. It’s the only form of meditation I know which works this well. I’m almost certain that there is deep genetic memory at work here from our prehistoric hunter-gatherer days where we either focused on the hunt or starved. I start to think like a fish. “Where would I position myself in the water to preserve energy”. “Where could I ambush my prey”. “What insects, smaller fish etc might be tumbling downstream out of control”, nothing else matters.
I started catching small perch straight away. I think I had 3 or 4 in the first 10 casts before that heart stopping moment only anglers will recognise when that thump is bigger than the gentle plucks you have been getting, when you know in an instant there is a physical connection from your hand holding your carbon fibre fishing pole down through the braid or nylon line to your hook/lure which for that briefest moment at least is connected to a ‘better fish’.
Now again our conditioning comes into play here as adrenaline automatically starts to pump through your veins and you go into fight, flight, or freeze mode. Those of us conditioned to these moments will strike here. Not necessarily your tv style ripping of the rod upwards or to the side, just a gentle lift or pull to make sure the hook point slides into the lip of your quarry and some of us instead freeze, we stop reeling and let the fish either hook itself or let go. Back then I’m pretty sure I was still the latter as it took a long time for me to get conditioned to controlling the emotion of that ‘hit’ and letting my cognitive retraining step in and muscle memory twitching my wrist to set the hook gently as I do automatically now even on the slightest change of tension in that connection between my hand and the lure. So, I think I froze and then the pull started as this fish hooked itself and started to try and swim away upstream putting a bend in my rod and a smile on my face.

It was a nice fish and a special one to me at a low point in my life, my first chub on a lure, and at night. Minutes before midnight and the start of a birthday which I will always remember for the wrong reasons, one I’d love to forget.
At a time when I needed something, when I felt like I had no-one and very little purpose. I had fishing.

Now fishing isn’t perfect. In fact, I have a love-hate relationship with it. There are days when I go fishing out of obsession and literally abuse myself in the attempt to try and catch certain fish or more fish or a better fish. I still switch into that focused mode and often forget time, forget to eat, drink and sleep. I get cold, wet, tired, hungry, thirsty and I just keep fishing. My knees hurt, my back aches and I get repetitive strain injuries in my shoulder elbow and wrist. At times my catchphrase of ‘It beats Netflix’ just doesn’t ring true anymore. But I keep on fishing.
Last December after recovering from illness I decided to have a go a really challenging myself in ‘The Big Lerf Winter League’. I’d discussed with friends I know through fishing a target of 10 species. One at the time I wasn’t confident of hitting. So, I joined in on meet ups and started to fish for fun at first enjoying company, banter, laughs and days out on our incredible coastline and in seaside towns catching small fish and eating pasties for lunch and chips shop suppers.

Then my first Christmas as a single man in 14 years came around and I really couldn’t face the thought of spending time around family and pretending I was okay. I wasn’t. So instead after a brief coffee at my brother’s house in Plymouth to see everyone and drop of gifts I went fishing. I fished from around 9am xmas day well into the early hours of Boxing Day. It was incredible how little I cared about being alone or Christmas in general as I was able to purge my mind and focus on adding to my tally. I was joined by another angler for a few hours in the evening and we discussed life a little but mainly fishing and the competition. I hit species number 10 that evening after Steve went home to his family. But of course, 10 wasn’t enough and my target then became 15.

Over the next 3 months. I was really struggling with loneliness. My best friend moved away to America to take an incredible opportunity with his job, the woman I was dating broke things off to spend more time with her children and I really wasn’t interested in work much at all. This competition gave me purpose and a reason to get off the sofa.

It was good and bad. Over those 3 months the only days I didn’t fish at all were those where I was away with work and couldn’t take a fishing rod. I fished in the snow, heavy rain, horrendous winds, every hour of the night, at times I didn’t sleep at all and there were plenty of evenings I didn’t eat as my plan to get a takeaway on the way home went out the window as I had fished on till 2, 3 or 4 in the morning and would often have over and hour to drive home afterwards. The loneliness went as I would find myself shoulder to shoulder with some of the friendliest people I have ever met who shared love of the sport had them out in similar conditions at times or on the nicer evening there would be a group of us huddled around a famous Plymouth burger shack sipping hot chocolates between casts or lining up along a harbour wall trying to avoid the seals in Brixham or in a packed car as we try and keep the diesel costs down as we drove down into the depth of Cornwall or up to the North east shores of Hartlepool in search of different species.

The money spent on tackle, parking, diesel and eating out isn’t even comprehendible. But how much is your sanity worth? By the end of the competition, I started to dread the finish. I didn’t want to think about how I would fill my time but had started to make plans at least for a lot of weekends over the summer and was dabbling at dating again, although I wasn’t shocked when I asked someone I was meeting on a date to meet by one of my fishing marks so I could try and catch a coal fish after she left and she didn’t message again afterwards – Insert Hands Over Face emoji haha -.

By the end I had wracked up an incredible 35 species of fish on lures (36 if you include giant gobies which weren’t aloud under competition rules) over the 4 months even with missing 3 weeks of December due to illness and a week of February on holiday as well as several work trips.

I had also fished myself out. I was fishing at midnight along side several others on the 31st of March still trying to add a final species. There was a fine line somewhere between helping me avoid the struggles of my mental health and driving myself mental.

I didn’t fish for a few weeks after the end of the competition. In fact, I hardly fished at all throughout the spring and summer in comparison to 2022 as ai threw myself in to other things and only fished the social events until bass fever started to set it after a house move and all the DIY that came after it started to settle.
I sit writing this with an aching back and a sore wrist after a 3-day jaunt around Hampshire seeking out bass on lures with my friends Wayne and Nathan for the Hampshire Open bass competition where again we were fishing at stupid hours, hardly stopping to eat or sleep. Meeting in beach carparks at 3am after late evening finishes to try and catch another or a bigger bass.

Nathan and I discussed as we waded back towards the cars after our final casts on Sunday Morning how what we were often doing is self-abuse. I drove home that afternoon with a terrible headache which I know was caused by lack of sleep.
So, fishing can be the ultimate remedy for my troubled brain. In fact, half an hour down on the harbour at lunchtime picking out a few gobies and wrasse is the best way to recharge my brain and help me focus during the afternoon.

When I feel absolutely terrible, lonely or anxious an evening wading an estuary with only the moonlight and sounds of the waves for company helps to wash away my troubles and leaves me feeling great. I really mean great too. I go home and sleep soundly recharged by the connection with the natural world.
But for someone with obsessive and addictive personality traits like me, it can also be a curse and there is a fine line which needs to be carefully trodden.
When I’m not able to fish, I often sit and write about it, talk about it, read about it, watch videos, or blow my money of more gear which I don’t need.
I go fishing to scratch the itch which will never stop itching, I go fishing to try and find peace in my own head and I go fishing because I bloody love it.

By Lee Russell (How To Trick A Fish) I’ve been following the Cornish lure Festival (CLF) for the last few years with particular interest in both the Bass and Species hunting aspects. Closely following anglers like Ben Bassett, Richard Salter, Will Pender and others I’ve learnt about these weekend long jaunts around our most western […]

In The Deep End – The Cornish Lure Festival