After spending the day filming last week with Old Ben, the style of fishing he was doing looked so insanely fun I wanted to give it a go for myself. The theme of the video is best described as “light shore jigging”. Basically fishing traditional methods scaled right back to somewhere in between LRF and “normal” lure fishing for bass.
Arming myself with the Tailwalk Micro Shore Jigging SSD 84 I headed down to my local rock mark this morning to give it a whirl.
Safe to say that is one of the most enjoyable mornings fishing I’ve had in a long time. After a couple of hrs I had had 3 bass to around 50cm more macks than I can count and a super chunky pollock.
The setup consisted of the SSD, little 2000 Tailwalk Speaky, 0.6PE Tailwalk braid and 8lb fluro leader.
Using metals from 8-12g I genuinely didn’t feel I was sacrificing much distance at all, owing to although the rod is only rated to 20g it is 8ft4 in length. Its mega light and perfectly balanced with around a 1500-2000 reel.
Its light enough in the tip to feel everything thats going on at the business end but with plenty of power lower down to handle the bigger fish [it did a fantastic impression of the letter U with the 50cm bass on 
]. Although some conventional c.32g lure rods will cast say a 10g lure, with the SSD I felt I was in control of the lure the whole time and could feel exactly what a little 10g lure was doing in the water column.
The finesse of the presentation and control of the lures is the key point of “stepping down” to this sort of setup where you can fish so much lighter and smaller than you usually would. As an experiment in the middle of the session I switched to my normal 9ft 32g rod with a 28g equivalent lure and after half an hr of catching nothing I switched back and was straight back into the fish.
The theme of the video we have made is very much along the lines of what I experienced this morning. When the conditions are not ideal [crystal clear water, flat calm and bright sunshine] everything we have seen so far is that scaling right back massively increases your catch rate.
Obviously some of you will already be trying tactics like this, especially in the estuaries, but for me trying this for the first time on the open coast is an absolute game changer and opens up so many possibilities…..
Waffle over – New Ben