Vaughan / Ladle Hooked on Bass

1. Auflage 2013
ISBN: 978-1-84797-726-7
Verlag: The Crowood Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 224 Seiten

Now an established classic on the subject, this revised and updated edition of Hooked on Bass shows anglers how to catch bass, particularly the bigger fish, from the shore. With excellent photography and clear, detailed diagrams to help illustrate the advice, any angler, beginner or expert, who has caught or would like to catch bass will find endless value in the pages of this book.

Alan Vaughan has fished in salt water for over forty years and has been described as one of the best bass anglers in Britain. He has also contributed widely to leading sea-angling magazines.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Vaughan, Alan

Ladle, Mike

Leseproben

1

The Life Cycle of the Bass

The bass is a fish of slow growth. It attains a fairly large average size only because it appears to have a much longer ‘expectation of life’ than the generality of sea fishes.

Michael Kennedy, The Sea Angler’s Fishes, 1954

ML   In the clear, cold waters of the English Channel, the first hint of the spring bloom of microscopic plants was staining the sea with a translucent, greenish tinge. The surface of the sea, untroubled by wind or rain, was swelling gently into deep oily dunes of water as it rounded the rugged, cliff-bound peninsula. As the tide began to flood towards the east, powerful eddies and surges broke upwards from the seabed pinnacles to boil on the surface of the race.

Half a mile north of the lighthouse, perched like a sentinel on the prominent rock, and twenty feet beneath the rolling swell, a school of grey-backed, silver-sided fish stemmed the powerful flow, seemingly with no effort. All the fish in the school were thickset male bass in the prime of life. The largest of them was over 8lb, but the majority were small fish of less than 4lb; all were now in breeding condition.

It was now the first week in May and the water was warm for the time of year. This followed a mild spell of weather which had lasted since Christmas. The male bass had been shoaled up, patiently waiting in the tide race, for almost two weeks. They fed, when the opportunity arose, on scattered shoals of tiny sandeels.

Suddenly a sense of excitement rippled through the assembled fish as a group of grey shapes loomed up from below. The largest of these newcomers was well into double figures and their flanks bulged with eggs, accumulated in the summer of the previous year. The excitement rose as the females entered the shoal and the male fish jostled and pressed around them, mouths agape and bodies quivering as their milt was released. Streams of tiny amber eggs issued from the hen fish and most of them were fertilised as they dispersed and drifted slowly up towards the surface of the sea. As quickly and as silently as they had arrived, the larger bass disappeared and the shoal of males settled once more to their silent wait.

In the following four or five days the fertilised eggs were carried to and fro on the tidal streams. Many of them became suspended in the cycling currents over the banks of shell-grit which lay on either side of the race. The vulnerable microscopic amber beads fell prey to a host of tiny, transparent, pulsing jellyfish, bristly, twitching copepods, fierce, spiky crab larvae and the fry of lesser fish such as rocklings. As the eggs drifted, they developed within them muscles, bones, nerves and little black eyes. By early June the tiny fish were visible, curled tightly inside their protective membranes.

As the bass larvae, each sporting a little sac of yolk, burst from their eggs, the fluid released by their escape attracted a further host of mini-predators. The stinging, thread-like tentacles of jellyfish entrapped countless young fish. Others fell victim to the shimmering comb-jellies. Glued to the branching, trailing, elastic filaments of the predators they were, one after another, reeled in and stuffed into wide-stretched mouths. Within the transparent bodies of the comb-jellies they joined their fellows, already crammed like little sardines, inside the bulging guts of their captors. Arrow worms, like vibrant slivers of glass, bristling with sickle-shaped jaws, lanced into the huddles of baby fish.

The surviving bass larvae were almost capable of swimming now, feeding on tiny pinpoints of marine life, too small and slow to escape even their feeble movements. Those which were lucky enough to encounter rich patches of food were growing quickly. Others, less fortunate, starved or died of disease. Four weeks after hatching many of them were swept close inshore by warm onshore breezes, in through the stone-flanked mouth of the harbour and into the torrent of salt water flowing in the narrow channel which led into a huge, shallow lagoon beyond. As they were swept along in the strong flow, many of them fell prey to the clumsy lunges of last year’s young pollack.

The most advanced larvae were already developing tiny scales as they swam about in tight little shoals over the shallow, eel-grass-clothed mud flats. The smaller specimens were mopped up by hordes of greedy gobies, with pop-eyes and rubber-lipped mouths, always on the look-out for an easy meal. The surface of the mud was a meshwork of lethal tentacles fringing the discs of burrowing anemones. Along with the bass, young sand-smelts and mullet were trapped, stung and swallowed.

As midsummer came and went the shallows warmed up, reaching 25° or 30°C on the hot sunny days. The young bass, now over an inch in length, prepared actively for the coming winter by consuming countless mysid shrimps, beach fleas and other small crustaceans, on which they pounced with typical bass-like ferocity. As they grew bigger, their diet changed to include larger marine slaters and burrowing sandhoppers (Corophium), which lived in little U-shaped tunnels near the high water mark.

The young bass spent their first winter in tidal channels sculpted by the run-off of water from the mud flats. In the next couple of years they fed, and grew fat, on the ragworms, crustaceans and midge larvae (bloodworms) swarming in their countless millions on the rotting eel-grasses which represented the rich, organic crop of the lagoon.

Some of the young fish had the good fortune to inhabit areas where the natural heat of the sun was supplemented by a flow of warm water from the cooling system of a power station. Even in winter, when ice fringed the mud flats, these lucky little bass continued to feed and grow more or less throughout the cold season, becoming nearly double the size of their siblings by the following year.

The power-station outfall, with its strong-flowing sources of heated salt water, provided the school bass with an almost ideal place to live. Injured and helpless prey animals, drifting along in the swift flow, were easy meat for the streamlined little predators. Boulders introduced to absorb the energy of the flowing water provided a haven for small shrimps, prawns, sandhoppers and slaters, which the bass nosed out and devoured. The warm water encouraged settlement of drifting larvae and enhanced the growth of ragworms, ‘snails’, crabs and similar prey. Bass of three or four inches long, now about one year old, fed very heavily on brown shrimps and mysid shrimps.

The young bass, like all young animals, were vulnerable to many predators and natural disasters. Lots of them perished when they were trapped on the intake screens of the power-station, particularly in the autumn, when they were close inshore. In winter many of them moved seaward so that fewer of the little fish turned up amongst the rubbish on the screens but, where temperatures were higher due to the inflows of warm water, the little fish were inclined to stay put throughout the year.

Predatory plankton animals which take a heavy toll of tiny bass.

During their first years the weather had been kind and more young bass than usual had survived the vagaries of the climate and the predation of many enemies. In the following years the young bass devoted their energies to feeding and growing. Then, between the ages of five and six, when they were just over one foot in length, the male fish became mature. The females matured when they were a little older and a little larger, perhaps fifteen inches in length and seven years of age. After they reached maturity the fish bred every year and in every spawning season each female laid her eggs in several batches.

The opercular (gill cover) bone of a sixteen-year-old, 7½lb bass.

Scales from a bass caught in 1985. The fish was spawned in 1976 and nine annuli (annual rings) can be clearly seen.

After spawning, the adult fish fed actively throughout the summer and autumn months, until shortening days and falling water temperatures drove them to migrate towards the south and west and to settle for the winter in offshore resting areas until increasing day length and rising temperatures stirred them into another cycle of migration, breeding and feeding.

This then is the life of the bass, as we understand it at present. In British and Irish waters their feeding and growing season is quite short and, as a result, it will probably take twenty years for a female fish to reach a weight in double figures; male bass are slightly slower-growing and rarely exceed 8lb in weight. In warmer waters off the French coast growth rates are similar, but further south, along the Atlantic coast of Morocco, a fish of 10lb will typically be only twelve or thirteen years old. On a day-to-day basis sea temperature is important in the way it affects feeding activity and, consequently, the growth of bass.

The history of every individual fish is recorded in its scales and bones. The principle is exactly the same as the well-known method of counting the rings in tree trunks to read the age of the tree. Not only do the number of rings (annuli) allow us to estimate the age of a fish, but there is much more we can learn from bass scales.

It is worth saying a word or two about the growth of scales themselves. When a young bass hatches from its egg it has no scales, and it is only a month or so later that the armour plating begins to develop. The first tiny scales appear on the flank, just by the tip of the pectoral fin, so these are the oldest scales and therefore the best guide to the age of the fish. As a bass goes through its life it gets knocked about by...