Chopping and changing (sample) lures surely affects my own catch rate, but wow it’s some buzz catching on stuff that you are so heavily involved in

I have less than zero interest in trying to keep a count of how many fish I might catch, and I also don’t happen to obsess about big bass only and therefore smaller bass are beneath me. I love going fishing, I love catching a few fish, and I love the whole being out there dynamic to our fishing. You know how much I rate our bass and our bass fishing, but in global fishing terms we are not talking about particularly big fish as such, and I am not personally aware of anywhere we can go bass fishing where we are going to catch serious numbers of 10lb+ bass. For sure it’s a buzz to connect with a bigger bass, but if bass fishing was only about “big fish” I’d be fishing for something else that does actually get big - whatever big actually is in fish terms - or I’d be saving up my time and money and only fishing certain places overseas……………….

We are all different here, but I can’t bring myself to obsess about numbers or lengths or weights of our bass, not when I have done and seen so much fishing around the world. I’d be remarkably daft not to have a slightly different sense of scale and outlook to those anglers who haven’t done so. I have worked in fishing for a long time now, and as much as I don’t have a “you have to do this and this” kind of contract with a company like Savage Gear, I would argue that I am worth employing partly because I am entirely comfortable with trying different things out which in turn might well affect my own catch rates. If I am not prepared to not use lures or other bits and pieces which I know have worked so well me for me in the past then what on earth would be the point of working on new stuff with somebody like Savage Gear? My work with Fiiish was never about getting involved with their new products, but a part of my current work with Savage Gear is - and I bloody love it. But it takes a certain mindset I guess to chop and change and ignore other lures I have here which I know have historically produced the goods. How on earth can I learn about the stuff we are working on and also hopefully change and improve things unless I actually do it in real fishing situations and not just think about it?

Sorry, all will be revealed in due course!

I was hoping to be able to tell you all about some of the new lures we have developed right about now, but the grownups at Savage Gear HQ have asked me to hold fire a bit longer due to the current state of the world and getting stuff made and shipped and so on. Regardless though, I guess I have dropped enough hints now for you to have half a clue that we have been working on some soft plastics for bass fishing, amongst other things I might add. You know how much I obsess about the OSP DoLive Stick in the 6’’ size especially, and paddletails are obviously a huge part of our bass fishing from shore and boat, but from my first meeting with the main grownup lure designer at SG HQ we both said that the DoLive obviously exists, I think it’s already perfect, but crumbs is there a lot of room for some different lures that we can more easily get our hands on especially. Something was suggested to me in that first meeting last summer which over time has got me more excited than any DoLive Stick ever did, and I genuinely mean that. Ideas, concepts and samples are all very well, but how would these things fish when you’re actually out there?

I can think of a number of occasions later last year and then after lockdown this year when I have been out fishing and almost as naturally as England suffer yet another batting collapse I’d have opened up my lure box and clipped on a DoLive Stick because of the ground or conditions or I have historically done really well on a particular lure in a particular spot before. But I’ve got a bunch of lovely looking sample lures which have needed some real water time in real fishing situations. From day one I felt very confident that they would work for bass but it’s a bit different when you already know that say a DoLive Stick or white Wave Worm at night or a Fiiish Black Minnow 120 bumped along the bottom have all produced so many bass for you - and I guess this is where my lack of obsession with numbers and/or sizes of bass comes in handy. I also don’t give the remotest stuff whether a mate or mates outfish me in a typical session. Nope, I get a kick out of fishing in so many different ways, and holy cow I can’t describe the buzz when you clip on a lure you have worked on so closely and then bang, you actually go and hook a fish on it.

The other day I was on about some new ground and the problems associated with fishing so close to such heavy weed cover, and it probably goes without saying that the obvious lures I would turn to fish places like these would be the DoLive Stick rigged weedless and weightless, some kind of paddletail swum nice and shallow on a belly-weighted weedless hook, and my mate Steve was doing well on the little Fiiish Black Minnow 90 which he is bloody deadly with and it’s THE size of Black Minnow I simply haven’t had enough time with but such a small lure doesn’t half chuck up some good fish.

So it’s an even trickier situation for me in some respects. It’s not only a big area of new ground and we are not sure exactly where the bass might be or when they might feed, but I am also not turning to any of my lures which I would usually turn to if I wasn’t working with a company like Savage Gear and genuinely getting so excited about these lures we are not far away from launching. By now I have caught enough bass on the various new lures and their different generations of samples to know enough about how well they work and so on, but how about clipping on the one lure in the range which is somewhat different to anything my two mates might have in their own lure boxes and having the determination not to take it off and instead turn to something so tried and trusted if my mates start catching and I don’t?

I really enjoy this kind of situation - new mark, the sort of ground that lends itself to some of these new lures we’ve been working on, indeed it’s one of those fishing sessions when I have visualised how I hope that this particular lure might work. But we’re talking about trying to outwit nature here, and for all the thought and designs and clever ideas, it doesn’t mean a bloody thing at the end of the day if you don’t actually go out fishing with the lures AND catch fish on them. Whilst that one 6lb bass from the session did it for me so much because it was some kind of validation that this new ground is worth some serious time, what got me jumping for extra joy on some slippery bladderwrack was the fact that this fish inhaled one of these new lures. I would hope that anybody who knows me knows that I genuinely don’t care who catches the most or the biggest fish if the other anglers are decent people and we’re having a good laugh, so the fact that I lost a bass at least the same size and possibly bigger during that session, plus that one nice bass was the best fish of the session, well it meant everything to me because I was not fishing with lures I have known for years now, and instead I was trying something different and if I blanked then so be it.

It’s the same sort of story with these fixed versions of the Line-Thru Sandeels, these Sandeel Pencil lures from Savage Gear. I am obviously doing some paid work with these people, but at the same time the SG grownups aren’t out fishing with me and they can’t make me not turn to lures I know so well and trust implicitly. Look in the two lure boxes I carry when I go fishing and if we’re on a shallow reef I can guarantee you will find at least one IMA iBorn 98F and one IMA Komomo SF-125 in there, and quite possibly a couple of colours of each lure because I trust them so much over shallow ground especially. But what am I going to learn about the company I am working with and the lures we are working on if I don’t forego my tried and trusted lures and spend real fishing time actually fishing with the products I am so excited about working on? I blogged about these Sandeel Pencils a while back so I don’t need to repeat myself, but it’s such a buzz to put lures like these into practise in more bass fishing situations than I had envisaged using them for - and then finding out that they work really well and I have got some more options in my armoury. You all have a good weekend and please enjoy the fact that my head is well and truly wrecked by the stuff we are working on and then how many more ideas going fishing with this stuff start churning around my brain………………..

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