This year for us low tide has outfished high by a considerable amount. Most of our fish have come “off the top” but not everything. We can only put it down to bait being more accessible at low tide rather than high tide so therefore the bass just turn on more at low tide or when it's dropping. If you think about it, it actually makes sense. Think of all those smaller fish in an estuary being able to hide in that tall thick weed that surrounds our rivers and huge kelp beds stuck to rocks on open coast lines which is a natural habitat when the tide is high. All those rocks and small hiding places at high tide adds to just an abundance of places for safety if you are a goby or a blenny. If you take away all that cover and real estate of places to hide you become very vulnerable which is why we will target ebb tides over flood tides. The lack of seaweed to hide in or cracks in rocks enables predators to really home in on food. It completely makes sense and we would say 70% of our better fish this year have been caught on the outgoing tide just before that low tide mark. Now not all low tides have been productive but the majority of them have. The spring lows don't really produce fantastic results but anything other than a spring low is really productive.
Fishing the tide out on the ebb this year has really increased our catch rate and we have been able to catch bigger fish also. Don't get us wrong though, there is value in fishing a spring on the flood as there are more fish that are willing to cover new ground but we are really liking low tides this year and it's really opened our eyes to quite a few new spots that we wouldn't normally fish.
Estuary:
This bass was caught in an estuary half way through the ebb on a soft plastic as it was getting dark.
This bass was caught on one of our homemade SP in complete darkness 1 hour before low.
Open Coast:
Small surface lures have caught the majority of nice-sized bass this year.
Not always do we catch them off the surface, sometimes shallow divers also do the trick.
We have also used a lot of our sub surface lures this years to just get below the surface when the bass aren't quite taking the lures off the top.
We have even caught bass in the surf off the beach when the tide has just turned to come back in from low on our shallow divers.
