Normally at this time of the year I spend a lot of time fishing upriver marks simply to avoid the beach goers that suddenly appear when sunshine coincides with school holidays, but when the tides reach a certain height most of these upriver hideaways become either un-fishable or unsafe to fish without a boat. On these tides if I want to fish I just have to bite the bullet and lose some sleep! This was one of those occasions, which saw me arrive at the Tower to begin fishing at 2am. The tide was at around 4:30am and was big enough to swamp the saltings further upriver but I was hoping the bigger tide would perhaps bring some sizable Bass into the river.
The weather was clear with a stiff 10 - 15mph SW breeze which you could usually expect to put some colour in the water, however, the water was pretty clear with only small amounts of weed which is unusual for the river at this time of the year and I guessed that the fishing was not going to be red hot; I wasn't wrong. Despite fishing large Ragworm and Lugworm baits out at varying ranges throughout the tide I got only two bites, the first on the last hour of the flood which turned out to be a 33 cm Bass and the second about an hour and a half on the ebb, which turned out to be the first fish's twin. Both fish fell to Ragworm and both naturally went back.
As the tide dropped off at about 7am it became obvious that fishing was over for another session and I headed home for a sleep asking myself (yet again) why I do this. Knackered is an understatement!
