As good as paddletails are, over some ground it sometimes feels like only a “twitch stick” will get the job done and produce fish

There are so many advantages to paddletails and the multitude of different ways we can rig and fish them, but from time to time I am faced with a situation during a bass fishing session that screams “twitch stick”. I love it when you’re fishing an extensive bit of ground and when you move around you might be dealing with a different. This happened right at the end of the session I was talking about on Monday’s blog post……………

I am still kicking myself a bit that I stayed perhaps twenty minutes too long in one specific area of the mark, but it had been producing fish and when it suddenly goes quiet it is obviously tempting to stay a bit longer - just in case. Twenty minutes with no more fish though and I came to the conclusion that the bass had either moved to another part of the mark, or they had buggered off completely. Scratch an itch time, so we moved across a lot of slippery rocks and gullies to access a specific bit of water that can sometimes hold a few bass right before the whole place seems to go quiet. It’s some fascinating but different looking ground.

And it looked awesome, but a few casts with my Gravity Stick Paddletail 120 rigged on that (increasingly interesting to me) 3/0 Decoy Violence VJ-36 jig head and something just wasn’t quite right with how it was moving through the water. Who doesn’t love being able to simply whack a lure out and wind it in and you know it’s fishing because you are getting some kind of feedback from the tail thumping away on the lure, but what if it’s not feeling quite right?

This photo isn’t from this particular session, but it’s similar ground to what we ended up fishing over

I will try and describe what we were fishing over - I had waded out to a rock that was large enough to stand on and not get washed off (he says!), but it wasn’t simply reef out in front of me. The large tide has stripped a long way back and I am right on that zone where the reef meets sand. There are lots of rocks either sticking out of the water or just beneath the surface, mostly with a lot of weed attached to them, but the actual bottom seems to be mainly sand in and around these rocks. There’s a lot of movement from the waves rolling in and it’s producing any number of rips and eddies and swirling movement. Which in my mind requires a bit of a different approach to simply whacking out a paddletail and winding it in, and especially when the two of us were not catching after this move across the rocks.

So what’s a “twitch stick”? It’s what I tend to call these soft plastic stick-type lures, mainly because I can’t think of a better term for them. Twitch stick or twitch bait makes a lot more sense to me than simply a “straight stick”, mainly because I think this family of lures as such can respond well to you actually working/twitching them, rather than simply just winding them in.

OSP DoLive Stick in the 6’’ size on a 6/0 weedless hook

Top of the tree for me is still the OSP DoLive Stick, and especially the larger 6’’ size. I rig it on the Savage Gear 6/0 Weedless Corkscrew hook, and if at all possible I will avoid using a belly-weight with the DoLive Stick because I prefer how it moves like this. I highly rate our Savage Gear Gravity Stick Pintails and I think I prefer the smaller 120 one overall, but as an out and out twitch stick I still think the DoLive Stick is the one. I am really getting into what is literally a straight stick, the HTO Slim Snax 6.5". It comes with a roughly 6/0 belly-weight weedless hook in the packet, but if I need more hooks I will use one of our belly-weighted Savage Gear 6/0 Weedless Corkscrew hooks. I do prefer the HTO Slim Snax 6.5’’ with a belly-weight hook over no extra weight. There are loads more of these types of lures out there, including of course those great looking EvoBass Lance 150 and 160 straight sticks, but I have never tried to get in there and buy some when they suddenly become available on the EvoBass website. What about the classic MegaBass XLayers as well? I have seen SO many good bass on these things, indeed give me a few more minutes of thinking about them and I am going to have to buy some all over again!

Savage Gear Gravity Stick Pintail 120 on the 4/0 belly-weight weedless hook that was designed for these lures

Anyway, so it just didn’t feel quite right when I was straight-retrieving a paddletail over this combination of ground and sea conditions. I want something that looks really natural when I pause the lure so it can get (naturally) washed around, just like a baitfish I hope. Time to change from the (lovely and easy to fish with) paddletail, so I delved into the horizontal slot washable lure box which sits at my side and grabbed a DoLive Stick which I rigged onto the 60/ weedless hook.

First cast and I put it right out in between two big rocks where plenty of attached weed was getting moved around in some delicious looking turbulence. Twitch, twitch, pause, twitch, twitch, pause, that kind of thing, and on that first cast I suddenly felt that unmistakable “bang” on my rod tip. That jolt is electric and I absolutely love it. A couple more twitches and the bass smashes the DoLive Stick. Outstanding! I quickly radioed Andy to say that I had caught a bass and he started to make his way over.

The bass I caught on the HTO Slim Snax 6.5’’

I have a couple more chucks with the DoLive Stick and then I change over to that HTO Slim Snax 6.5’’ which I rig on a belly-weight 6/0 weedless hook. I really like trying different lures when there are fish around because how else am I going to learn? A bunch of bass on a lure (DoLive Stick) that I have caught heaps of fish on before tells me nothing more than I already know about this killer lure, so why not change over? This HTO lure and hook combination absolutely flies, and whilst distance isn’t the key at all here, with how well these things cast it I find it really helps with accuracy. First cast with the lure change and bang, bass on!

Andy gets to me and clips on a MegaBass Super Giant XLayer 6'' on a belly-weight hook. He sends it out there and bang, he’s into a nice fish on his first cast after the lure change. We’re both fishing similar methods now so I obviously can’t prove that changing to a twitch stick approach was THE method of the moment, but it was interesting how we had been covering this ground for a short while with our paddletails and hadn’t caught any fish. First cast with a different kind of lure that was allowed to twitch and pause and move around with the turbulence both produced more bass for the two of us. Surely more food for thought?

Andy’s bass on the MegaBass Super Giant XLayer 6''

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