Catching good fish on a new lure absolutely wrecks my head! (Craft Bleak)

Via my work I probably get to see and try more lure fishing tackle than most anglers, plus I have been working in fishing for a very long time now. Perhaps then I should be a bit more blase and cynical about the whole thing, but I’m not. Almost every single thing in fishing fascinates more than it ever did, but one of the things that really wrecks my head is trying a new lure out because it interest me - then catching a good fish on it………….

Just like the other day. I am sorry to bang on about that good bass I lucked out with in March, but it’s still slightly freaking me out how that fish hit my lure where it did and at that time of year. It’s nothing to do with boasting about a decent fish I got lucky enough to catch, but the catching of a bass like that on my local coastline in March has left a big impression on me. When something rather different happens my brain tends to try and work out what happened.

When I was at the Big One Show earlier in the year, a very good all round lure and fly angler called Robbie told me about the new Savage Gear Craft Bleak paddletail. The new lure was very much on his radar with perch and pike and zander, but he is also a very good bass angler and he knew I’d be interested (thank you!). I then saw Robbie at the Glasgow Angling show the weekend after the Big One, and he had a 120mm Craft Bleak with him which we rigged on a 6/0 3g belly-weight hook and had a quick swim with it in the outdoors tank. What else do addicted anglers do when you see a new lure? You play with it of course! I don’t think I rigged it particularly well because as good as the lure looked in the hand, I don’t think I had it swimming quite right in the tank. Small tanks though are never the best place to really see what’s going on with a lure.

Then another talented all round angler I know contacted me the other day to tell me that he had caught his first few (March) bass of the year on the smaller 100mm version of the Craft Bleak. He was blown away by how the lure was fishing, plus it kinda helps that he went and caught bass on it! So I contacted the grownups and asked if I could please see some of these new lures. The word I got back was that they were proving very popular in the freshwater world but they would see what they could spare to send me. A couple of days later a small package duly arrived and I was very glad to see a clam packet of the 120mm size in the White Pearl Flash in amongst a couple of other colours.

Do I need a new paddletail for swimming on weedless hooks or behind a cheb weight and so on, and especially because I so often turn to the Gravity Stick Paddletails and the Slender Scoop Shads? What do you think? I love trying new stuff though. As soon as I got one of those lures into my grubby mitts I had convinced myself that I did indeed need a subtly different kind of paddletail for swimming because the Craft Bleak has a different profile to the other two types I tend to carry. The lure-addled brain talking to itself!

Okay, so as you know I work with Savage Gear, and now as a result of the buyout, Pure Fishing as well. As with the Slender Scoop Shad which I didn’t know about until it hit the market though, I knew nothing about the Craft Bleak until Robbie told me about it. It’s meant for the freshwater market, but to me it looks like perfect bass food, plus there are what I think are strong bass fishing colours within the range. And yes, because I work with Pure Fishing I was able to ask to see some to try out. The jaded old git in me should probably open the package and then put them aside to try out if I can find the time, but in truth the excited child in me was itching to cast and swim them as soon as I could.

Which happened to be that morning in late March when Andy and I went out fishing together. I had rigged one of the White Pearl Flash 120mm Craft Bleak lures on a 6/0, 6g belly-weight weedless hook I have here, and because I was so interested to try out a new lure, it just happened to be the first thing I clipped on when we got down onto the rocks. I was intending to give the new lure a few chucks to get a quick idea of how it cast and swum and so on - then change to something I actually know and trust - but I went and hooked that big bass on the new lure. Which absolutely bloody wrecks my head.

I get all the different arguments - another lure might well have caught the same fish at the same time, it wasn’t the lure or the colour because the bass was on the feed anyway, it’s actually a clever marketing ploy (to get so lucky with a bass like that in March in the UK!), and so on. But you can only catch on whatever lure you are actually fishing with, and because I am little more than a perpetually excited kid with my fishing, I happened to have a new lure on which I wanted to try. I will never know whether another lure would have caught that fish, so within a few seconds I was talking myself into a different profile of paddletail perhaps making the difference etc. I love catching fish on new lures, but in some respects it’s also the worst thing with how my head works. I used to literally panic-buy DoLive Sticks because I’d catch fish on a different colour then my warped brain would convince myself they could be discontinued, and now because that big bass smashed my Craft Bleak I am trying to find a clever way of fitting a good combination of Gravity Stick Paddletails, Slender Scoop Shads, and Craft Bleaks in the long-sided washable lure box which I carry together with the short-sided one. I now know the lure works for bass, but does it really offer me something different? Much more time is of course required, but at least I know the Craft Bleak works. Before any of the cynics in you question my motives here, please at least give me some credit that if I talk about some of the fish I might happen to catch, I always tell you what lures I have been using whatever the brand might be. You all have a good weekend……………..

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