Tuesday, 14th December I could hear the ocean at night. Meaning the currents and weaves were strong. It was the beginning of the full Moon phase and the high tide was at almost its maximum. I generally do not like it when the ocean is that rough, but the day was sunny and warm, and I was getting restless around the house. My wife, God bless her, encouraged me to go and so I picked up a few frozen squid and my rods and headed to Praia da Alagoa, my usual spot in front of the restaurant.
This time I was lazy enough to use one rod only – quite unusual for me, but in my defence, the tide was rolling like crazy, I needed 140-gram pyramid weight to keep the usual 2 hook system in place. And so, I was more resting and talking to other fisherman than fishing… There were 3 of us on the beach that day. The first bass around a kilo mark was caught by my fellow sufferer to the left of me, and I had no interest whatsoever. After about an hour, I realized that all of us were trying to cast as far as we possibly could, and that yielded no results. I tried not 20m from the shore and almost immediately got one small spotted bass, not even 20cm... I released it and continued casting short distance. For almost an hour there was no action whatsoever – I would only occasionally check the bait as there was quite a lot of seaweed. The tide started receding, and it became quite shallow… I believe it was more than half way down, and we everyone had given up on fishing, we were all getting ready to leave when I finally got a bite! I ran to the rod, picked it up and started reeling in – the water was so shallow that I could immediately see the back of a big fish in the surf. And getting it in entailed more navigating the weaves to close the distance rather than tiring the fish as it was so shallow it did not have the depth to swim. After a minute or two I beached quite a nice bass, around 2 kilo… Needless to say, I was quite content with the catch.
Encouraged with my success, the following day, 15th December, I went back. This time I used 2 rods. On the first cast I got a seabass of about 800gr, and had quite a few weak bites – in contrast to the previous day, there was quite a lot of small fish around, probably sargo or mucharra. The session went on with constant bait changing and recasting until the tide got low. Again, in shallow water I got another seabass, but this one was a real baby bass – it could not have been more than 300gr… One thing is clear – there is currently seabass in the surf!
