10/09/2024
The South Coast Bass Lure Open 2024.
This year Martin Scanlon and I entered our first solo lure competition and my first ever competitive fishing match. Running from midday Friday-Sunday we had 48hrs to catch bass over 45cm in Hampshire. The biggest bass wins the comp and the 3 biggest of bags caught going for second and third place.
We fished our absolute socks off for those 48hrs, with only few hours kip each day to make sure we made the high and low tides on the marks. We drove ourselves to the ground in the hunt for topwater bass, covering 34kms by foot and making quite literally thousands of cast using various topwater lures.
We ended up catching a lot of fish and managed to bag a decent few over the 45cm minimum. I managed 5 fish over the minimum and my biggest 3 were 52, 57 and 61cm. All of which were caught in the space of an hour on the Friday afternoon using a 125 Patchinko totalling 170cm for the 3 bass. We went to the weigh in on Sunday a little apprehensive of what else was caught as we knew it had been hard going and wondered if we managed to get a competitive total length. Turns out we had and I took 3rd place, pipping Martin to the prize by just 1cm. Although a solo event it was a team effort to keep each other going and motivated to keep fishing, which I know is hard to believe from us but it was a real battle of endurance to keep the fish hitting the bank in the hunt for that big one.
Massive thank you to you Martin for all the shared fishing experiences, marks, knowledge and the unhealthy addition of lure fishing we have had together over the past few years. We will close this chapter off with a chartered bass trip in October which was apart of the 3rd place prize.
The 61cm bass was also a PB.