Hunting for sea-bass with the fly
may sound like a difficult undertaking for anyone who would like to approach fly-fishing in salt waters during the
summer time, when "hordes" of loud vacationists station everywhere.
The best is to determine the optimal contingencies: when, where, approach and technic.
WHEN: in the warm season sunrise and sunsets are the probably the only moments when one can hope to come across the Dicentrarchus labrax.
WHERE:
the best spots are the mouths of rivers and lagunes. Ports and harbors often offer good opportunities too but from a purely
aesthetic and subjective standpoint, I prefer estuaries and salt-ponds.
After finding the right place and being there at the right time, the hunt can begin.
Even if I happened to take sea-bass after a long cast into the blue,
it is surely more exciting to hunt them by sight. So to increase further
the possibility to meet of our friend the bass, further comments can be made:
Places with plenty of young mullet, beloved prey of the sea-bass, are top scorers.
The schools of mullet will often make
themselves visible from the distance by feeding at the surface and creating rings on the water that are similar
to the circles of trout raising on insects.
In regards of the flies, sea-bass do not really split hairs; streamers or poppers - even in big size - will work well;
of course the rules large baits catch large fish, small baits catch small and large fish apply to them as well.
By the way, the yellow colour seems to have that something more in comparison to other tones.
By carefully observing the movement of the schools of mullets, one can determine if a bass is hunting around.
The jump of all the fries out of the water indicates the certain presence of
our predator. A cast directly in the middle of the fugitives will almost certainly return a sea-bass.
During the warm season, these are often small to medium sea-bass but to have them on the fly gives a lot of satisfaction.
In summer it is necessary to wait for the twilight or complete darkness before the
bass start hunting.
Waiting until the late hours has paid off and another sea-bass fell prey to a yellow bucktail streamer
, after the photo-ritual (with flash given the light condition) it can return to swim in its element.
