To most of you I suspect the sea bass represents nothing much more than an ultimate symbol of trendy cuisine Steamed sea bass Expensive and exclusive, the fish with cachet. It is not hard to trace the upsurge in the popularity of sea bass as a gourmet dish The seafood market is fiercely fashion-conscious. When salmon farming made that fish widely available, the restaurateurs discovered the lure of monkfish; when monkfish became ever so slightly passé, the sea bass emerged to become the favoured fish of the well-heeled professional.In the past, the bass was a fish anglers treasured and diners ignored. To those of us who remember the days when the sea bass moved in thick shoals off the coast – and in these parts I am talking of only 20 years ago – the famine of these present days signals an ecological disaster. In 10 more years we may well have seen the last of the sea bass.

My friend and neighbour John King is a marine biologist who has fished the waters around here all of his life. A bad night’s fishing was when you caught three or four fish. “In those days the gourmet hadn’t discovered the taste for bass and the commercial fishermen hadn’t discovered monofilament nets to catch them We had it all to ourselves. We never took more than we needed.”Indeed I remember one epic night on Ballyquinn beach, famous for its surf on a spring tide, when some 70 fish were caught.

They were measured and weighed and most were returned alive to the water. In those pre-green days, we were taught the value of conservation by older anglers. These days you would be lucky to catch three or four bass in an entire summer season.My memory of bass fishing begins in the early Seventies. The daily ritual began with the digging of lugworm on the ebb tide. It was back-breaking work, digging hole after hole in the wet sand until we had amassed enough worms for a night’s fishing.