Went for a walk and a bit of a sniff around a few of my favorite places - not to fish - its been way too wild for that with record wind speeds and rainfall but it has also been very mild. I was shocked but probably shouldn't have been surprised at the scale of the changes I saw. Sand dunes cut back by the enormous surf with vertical drops of a couple of meters in places that could do with edge protection to stop an unsuspecting walker or runner having a nasty accident, walls that have exploded across roads, steel cages of rocks intended for protection from costal errosion thrown aside like a discarded tea bag and one of the things that surprised me most was a near flat strand that's now about a meter higher at the high water mark than it was last summer. Its really hard to take in the scale of the changes to places I once knew so well. So with all this having happened above the surface you'd have to wonder what's changed under the water..of course these changes are happening all year round but these winter storms have been quite exceptional in their power and magnitude. It remains to be seen what effect it will all have on our bass fishing when it starts to kick off again which hopefully isn't too far away now. I think it will surely make sense to be a bit more open minded than usual on the when and where until patterns start to develope as the season progresses...
