Do some lures have an optimum size where bigger isn’t necessarily more efficient?

For reasons which I am sure are fairly obvious I have been more thinking about various lures and how they cast and cover water, at what depths they swim and how this relates to different conditions, and in a roundabout way this leads me to thinking about certain lures I know really well and which to me seem to be a kind of sweet spot of design, length, weight and so on…………

Whilst I find myself turning ever more to various soft plastics and then lures such as the Sandeel Pencil in its various sizes when I need a long-casting shallow-runner - surface lures aside here - particularly good, regular hard lures still fascinate me and I would rarely go out bass fishing without say a an IMA Hound 125F Glide or the killer little IMA iBorn 98F which a mate has recently “discovered” as a lethal bass catcher in the right locations. I have a real thing for some of the Shimano Japan hard lures but with how tricky they can be to get hold of I am sticking with the ones I have already got and hoping I don’t go snagging them up too often.

The Hound Glide is an easy lure for me to talk about because it’s been a part of my armoury since it first appeared in the UK back in 2012 and the first bass I ever caught on it was 6lbs. The conditions weren’t remotely rough that day and it actually took me a while to switch on to how good the Hound Glide is in rougher and windier conditions. What really struck me from day one with the lure was not how amazing it looks in the water because in reality it swims the same as many other hard lures, rather it was the fact that I hadn’t yet come across a 125mm long, regular type of medium diving hard lure which got me out to a certain rock over in Ireland where the fish above came from.

So I did get rather excited when a few years after the Hound 125F Glide came out, a larger and heavier 140mm version appeared on the market. Of course I bought one because I was convinced it was going to be an even better option than the original Hound Glide for certain situations, but a session or two later and it was very apparent that the 140mm version wasn’t a patch on the smaller 125mm long one when it came to casting like an arrow into the wind. You know how some lures literally “cut” into the wind and some lures seem to almost “float” into the wind if you catch them just right? The original Hound Glide cuts into the wind for me and doesn’t need a 100% correct cast to get out there really well, whereas some lures kinda float into the wind when conditions get hectic and also need perfect timing on the cast which I can’t pretend I manage every single time!

Other lures which I could talk about here would be the regular IMA Salt Skimmer and then the large “Grande” version which doesn’t float my boat at all. I love the IMA Sasuke 120 and 140 but never really got the chunkier 130 version which I don’t think casts nearly as well. Does any of this matter though? It obviously depends on where and how you need to go about your bass fishing, but I’m loving the added impetus I get from thinking about how we go about our bass fishing in relation to some of the work I am doing with Savage Gear. You all have a good weekend…………

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