Are boxes full of the more “boring” lures where a lot of bass anglers will find themselves eventually? (because they catch!)

Whatever you think and/or get out of this blog of mine, at its core I would suggest that it is one obsessed angler’s journey into, upwards and through this drug that is lure fishing for bass. I didn’t plan my own fishing like that and I never started this blog with any other plans than yapping to other anglers about fishing, but if somebody out there could map the direction of my blog then I would imagine I am following an addiction curve which is very similar to many of you out there. It’s just that I choose to or indeed need to communicate about it because of my bouncing brain syndrome……….

If you have been lure fishing for bass since before you were born then I guess you don’t read this blog anyway, but if you are anything like me - oh you lucky person! - then I wonder firstly where you are on this lure fishing journey, and secondly if most of us do indeed follow a similar path to enlightenment if you like. If we take the where and when of fishing as obviously the most important elements which we will obsess over for a lifetime but never really get close to sussing it all out, then much like bait and rigs and rods and reels in bait fishing, for a lure junkie it’s surely the whole lures thing which is a big part of the attraction. I want to catch fish, I try my best to catch fish, but it’s the whole picture which grabs me. I don’t pretend to maturely rise above an obsession with the mechanics of the sport or pastime which utterly consumes me.

I think back to coming across the senko (a straight plastic “stick”) via some friends in Ireland, and it was that one “boring” looking soft plastic which in time got me thinking so much about how a lure simply doesn’t always need to be doing all that jingling and jangling I used to obsess about so much. I had to have been at the right part of my lure fishing progression curve to be able to accept a lure like this. Loads of different stuff works on its day but I couldn’t help noticing how well we ended up doing so well at night for example, fishing with a lure on a straight retrieve which was basically doing nothing exciting at all in the water. Over time the DoLive Stick entered my arsenal because I liked how the lure swam so subtly but lethally on a straight retrieve, and also how it did a bit for me on a twitch/pause sort of swim. At the end of the day it’s still a very subtle, almost “no-action” lure when compared to a lot of the diving hard lures we might turn to though.

And then I got the chance to start influencing the lures I can get to use via this work with Savage Gear. I am nothing to do with the Sandeel Pencil but it was me who pushed hard for a fixed-hook version of their original Line-Thru Sandeel, and it was me who then pushed for different colours and saltwater hooks for what has become the Sandeel Pencil SW. Fifteen years ago I would never have obsessed about a hard or soft lure which is doing so comparatively little in the water but which gives me so many options perhaps because of that? I can whack and crank it in the surf, I fish it like a needlefish at night, I can match the size of the Sandeel Pencil to the current and the depth in an estuary and almost dead-drift it, and I can and indeed do think of it as an long-range soft plastic with how shallow and subtly it swims for me over reefs and so on. Such a simple lure in many respects, but could I do nearly as much with say the awesome IMA Hound 125F Hound Glide? (check out the new #Y0145 Aji colour by the way, I need help!).

One lure which Mads and I did together right from the start was the Gravity Stick Pintail, indeed if I think about our first meeting over in Denmark, the first lure I wanted to talk to him about was a soft plastic which could sort of combine the best bits of a senko and a DoLive. Mads listened to my ideas about casting distance and straight-retrieves and twitching and so on, and in due course he started sketching. Months and months and samples and samples later we had the finished Pintail ready to go. I do wonder if this rather clever lure has been a bit overshadowed by how good the Paddletail and Pulsetail are, but the Pintail is awesome - you need confidence though to fish with a lure like this when other lures (deliberately) do more. Where are you at on the whole less is more confidence thing?

Look at the simple sort of S-curve retrieve which surprised the hell out of me the first time I tried it properly when I was out fishing. You can straight-retrieve the Pintail just like you would a senko at night, and it was deliberately designed to respond to a little less rod movement than the DoLive can require to really get it twitching and falling. I wanted a really good casting ability but you can really get it going even better again if you put one of those weight spikes in the slot at the rear of the lure - Mad’s idea - and then you can of course rig it on one of the belly-weight 6/0 hooks and almost do what you want with it. For sure I also obsess about paddletails and pulsetails and so on when it comes to soft plastics, but I keep coming back to what some anglers refer to as “no-action” lures because I am utterly convinced that they sometimes give me an edge - when you have the confidence to fish like this. You all have a good weekend and I will catch you next week………..

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