Another fishing related thing I can do during lockdown is repair and mend my soft plastics. Yes, it’s getting to me!
From time to time I see anglers posting up photos of their hard and soft lure collections online and it makes me think of my own lure related issues. I have such a thing for the DoLive Stick for example that I wouldn’t even try to measure my collection of them in packets of lures anymore. Nope, I’ve got that many I would judge my collection on weight of lures rather than packets; it’s that bad. Am I ever going to need that many DoLive Sticks though? You know the answer to that, but by nature I am a bit of a panic buyer, as in I seriously get into a certain lure and in no time at all I have convinced myself that whichever lure company makes them is surely going to stop making them at some point so I need to buy enough to last me for at least several lifetimes. And then I get into different colours and I convince myself that so and so colour works best at so and so location or time of day or night. It’s a vicious circle and also a measurable sickness……………..
Soft plastics obviously get damaged easier than hard lures and I am sure we have all had a few occasions when a bass has ripped the lure clean off your weedless hook (these hooks here are still my favourite weedless hooks for senkos and DoLives etc., hitchhikers definitely prolong the life of soft lures and make for such easy rigging) - but in reality I have enough of the lures here to not really need to worry about it. But I do. It’s the way my head works, and with many of the lures we use not being exactly cheap plus we should obviously try and reduce waste, it makes perfect sense to me to try and prolong the life of all hard and soft lures I might fish with if I possibly can. I will change the split rings and treble or single hooks on hard lures when required, so why on earth wouldn’t I try to repair and get more use from DoLive Sticks or Savage Gear Sandeels or Fiiish Black Minnows etc. if I can?
I guess a lot of you here have heard of the Mend-It soft plastic repair “glue”? I have used this stuff for years now and it’s brilliant. It used to be very easy to get hold of here in the UK and then for reasons unknown to me it then became harder to find, but I see it listed here now which is good to see. I guess it’s not that cheap and if you open it up and then leave it unused for longer than say a year it goes really gloopy and stops working so well, but you can so easily repair tears and rips and holes and even cut soft lures in half and stick them back together and so on (customising soft lures by adding different tails and so on?) that I reckon a little bottle of Mend-It ends up being really good value for money. You know all those little holes and tears which end up appearing on your soft plastics over a bit of fishing time with them? I literally “paint” some Mend-It on and into the damaged bits and then leave it to dry before rigging the lure again. I have got soft plastics here which have been “painted” multiple times now and they keep on fishing just fine. It’s really handy to be able to repair the holes where the hook comes out of when they start opening up over time. Again, it’s not as if I really need to be doing this with some of the panic-buying I have done over the years, but my argument is always going to be why on earth not try and repair something instead of just binning it?
When I was struggling to get hold of Mend-It I did a bit of looking around and came across the Savage Gear Fix-It Soft Lure Resin. It tends to be easy to get hold of - here for example - and it works just as well as Mend-It although it’s a bit more of a gel than a liquid and you need to repair your lure and then leave it be to dry for a bit longer than with Mend-It. Neither Mend-It or the Savage Gear Fix-It Soft Lure Resin are the sort of thing I would take out fishing with me to repair my soft lures on the spot - they work perfectly but they are not an instant fix like Super Glue which I don’t like for repairing lures because it goes all hard when it dries - indeed I do what I need to do here at home, and especially during lockdown when I have been having a close look at any soft plastics I have got rigged up and seeing whether they need a bit of TLC. Hell, these repair glues are so easy to use that even me with my lack of DIY skills hasn’t got into any trouble with them.
Anyway, so there you go and this is about the state of my fishing brain at the moment - fried! I have landed more big bass in my sleep over the last few weeks than swim in our oceans, and blow me down if I didn’t actually have a dream about taking a new lure rod out fishing and then writing a review of it on here. Anybody care to read into that particular dream?! I am going to link to a few more podcast episodes below that I have listened to and found particularly good, hope that might be of use to a few of you here. You all have a good weekend and please stay as safe and well as possible…………….
It’s a rugby podcast but this episode is actually a really interesting interview with the actress Olivia Colman.
I am really enjoying this US based Seven Stripes Fishing podcast, mainly about striped bass fishing, and the most recent episode is fascinating. How much do you hear US striped bass anglers and guides talking about specific bait species that the stripers are feeding on in specific places? Really gets me thinking.
Really good chat and interview with Gareth Evans, the man behind the new Gangs of London TV series on Sky, plus he directed The Raid, The Raid 2, and Apostle which I have watched twice now and really liked if that can be the right word. You can find Apostle on Netflix.
I recently listened to this cold case, true crime podcast. “Bear Brook” is fascinating.
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