Anybody got any clever ideas about how I might almost float over the mud?

A fleet-footed, lightweight wading bird I am not! I went for a bit of a wander yesterday morning, rod in hand, but not really expecting to fish much. I wanted to scratch a couple of itches and find out on a smallish low water whether there was actually enough water left at a specific spot I’ve been thinking about in an estuary. Then work out the timings from there about later in the flood tide starting to put new water on some really interesting looking ground…………

It still feels really strange to be doing this sort of fishing/scouting without Storm by my side, and I think I might have taken to a bit of talking to myself instead of the dog without realising I am doing it! Anyway, so I got on with trekking out to this part of an estuary and to time getting there with roughly low water. It was a pretty small tide yesterday but I could see what looked like enough water for bass to potentially look for food. What I hadn’t quite factored into my thinking though were the mud banks between me and that bit of water.

I know all about the mud in many of these south west estuaries due to having had crab traps in the Tamar for many years. The trick to working them was to keep moving so you didn’t get stuck in the softer parts, but even then there were many times in the middle of the night especially when I would be doing my pots and it would be particularly hard to get one foot out of the mud to keep moving down the row - and I’d get a bit of the fear about getting stuck in the mud in the dark when the tide turned………..

Bloody typical then that I could see what looked like some decent sized fish moving around in what had to be very shallow water. When I started fishing estuaries for bass some time ago now, for some reason I kind of assumed - without really thinking about it - that all the bass in the system would leave the estuary on the ebb and return on the flood. When some of these Irish estuaries fished well you could sometimes catch so many bass that it did feel a bit like all the bass in the system swimming past you on the last of the ebb, but obviously this is not the case for multiple different reasons.

So those few fish I saw moving around in that shallow murky water yesterday could well have been mullet, but they could also have been bass. Where there are mullet in an estuary I tend to fancy there also being bass, and when the water gets really shallow and murky I definitely fancy there being some bass around more than mullet. The problem was that there was a lot of very soft looking mud between me and those fish I could see moving around. Of course I tried walking out on it to at least put a creature bait in front of whatever type of fish they actually were, but almost immediately I could see that I was going to get into all sorts of mud related trouble. Seriously soft. Not too bad when you’re moving around doing your crab traps, but how about standing still and ninja-like while you present your lure?

It wasn’t happening. I took the sensible decision not to get out to those fish and potentially get stuck in the mud in the middle of nowhere with nobody knowing where I was and with my mobile phone in my rucksack and on silent because I like my peace and quiet. I did go for more of a wander around and I found a sort of side-channel where there was a bit of bladderwrack which I could use as a bit of a platform for not sinking into the mud. I began to see a few fish moving around as the tide began to flood, but I think it was mainly mullet and I couldn’t get any interest if there were any bass around. I also had to get back home for a video meeting about shiny new fishing tackle.

Anybody got any ideas then for safely negotiating big, soft mud banks and being able to stand there to fish without sinking right in? I have this mental image of those snow shoe type things I probably saw in some James Bond film back in the day! It’s not a problem I am going to lose sleep over because there are numerous other places I can fish around the low water and not face such soft/deep mud related issues, but those fish which were moving around like they were have got me thinking…………….