Further down the cheb-tastic rabbit hole, it’s making a lot of sense (big thanks for a specific comment)

This blog has always been along the lines of me pouring out the fishing related contents of my brain, because if I don’t communicate with you all and offload it I’m going to be in a hell of a state! I seriously enjoy and value your interaction with me via the comments and on my Facebook page and I do my best to reply to the comments when I can. Because I have set up this blog whereby I need to okay the comments, I get very little unpleasant stuff, but it’s easy to delete and report it when I do so it’s no great hassle and if I put myself out there I guess that these days you have to expect a certain amount of unpleasantness. I stand by my firm belief though that most anglers are really good people, indeed the absolute highlight of my job is the amount of anglers all around the world who I get to call friends…………

So you might have noticed that I have been going down a rabbit hole recently with the Savage Gear Slender Scoop Shad and different ways to rig and use it (SSS for short, thank you Joe!), but of course the same methods and techniques and reasons for playing around like this most likely apply to a load of other paddletails which you might use. I have yet to try it all with my Gravity Stick Paddletails for example because I have done so well with them rigged on belly-weight weedless hooks, but once again there are any number of different soft plastics like these out there these days. I am pretty sure I collectively fish with soft plastic paddletails more than any other lures for my bass fishing, but I am sure this reflects a lot of the type of ground I might fish.

Anyway, as per this blog post here I bought some of the very nice Xorus Texas Power jig heads recently and then told you about how I was rigging them up and so on. During my first proper bass session fishing I realised that I needed to modify something about the setup and I told you about that in this blog post here. Then I told you about achieving the same sort of thing - to me it’s problem solving at the end of the day, matching your technique to ground and conditions etc. - via some proper fumblings with cheb heads (about time?). Cheb-tastic. The further I go down this rabbit hole, the closer I feel that I am getting towards another very viable and alternative option or solution to add to my bass fishing repertoire.

What I like is making the same or similar items of fishing tackle work even harder for me - a modular system? - because it means that I don’t need to carry more stuff and it’s more efficient. I go down these rabbit holes because I hope to come out the other end with more viable fishing options to help me more effectively deal with certain sea conditions and location dependent obstacles that I need to overcome. If I can get roughly the same gear I already carry anyway to give me more viable options then that to me is a win.

So in a little plastic chewing gum tub which lives in my waterproof rucksack I will always have a small selection of weedless hooks and a few jig heads. Some of those weedless hooks will have belly weights and some won’t. My weedless hooks of choice are obviously going to be the 6/0 and 4/0 corkscrew based ones that I got to make with Savage Gear, and in a perfect world I’d like this cheb-tastic stuff to work around the use of these weedless hooks which are designed for corkscrews because they make your soft plastics last a lot longer, they are so easy to rig, and I have landed my largest bass so far on one and I know they are bloody good. As ever though, you most likely are using different weedless hooks to me and that’s just fine.

But as I described the other day, the way that a cheb weight sits means that it doesn’t sit quite right on a corkscrew designed weedless hook. This doesn’t really matter because down my rabbit hole I came up with rigging it all as per the photo above. I know it works just fine because I have caught bass on it now. Ideally though I’d prefer to carry less hooks with me because it’s less confusing, and I really, really like “my” weedless hooks which work specifically with corkscrews or hitch-hikers. I might add that it’s no great hassle pre-rigging a few SSSs with corkscrews in the front of them to allow for a conventional weedless hook, but again it’s another step I could do without if at all possible.

Album of the year? It’s going to be close, damn this is some fine music……….

On this blog post from Wednesday a lads who calls himself “Nick S” left this exact comment: “I put a split ring in the front of my weedless corkscrew hooks if I am fishing with chebs you can use your favourite corkscrew hooks then”. I read the comment, I okayed the comment, and the lightbulb lit up in my head just like the finest black metal does (is the new Blackbraid album “Blackbraid II” going to be the album of the year? It’s bloody awesome). Thank you SO much Nick! I hope that somewhere down this rabbit hole I would have got here eventually, but fishing to me is so much about thinking and sharing info like this. I was literally heading out the door to try and tuck away from the worst of Wednesday’s weather and see if we could find a fish or two, so I quickly grabbed one of my 6/0 weedless hooks out of my little chewing gum container and put one of these 7mm split rings on the front of it.

And I went out fishing with my mate Mark. I gave him a few of these smelt colour SSS lures I had recently got my hands on, but what Mark chooses to fish with is obviously completely up to him. He was oohing and aahing at the smelt colour though and he obviously felt as confident as I did to rig one up - which he did so on a 5g cheb weight. We found some very bouncy conditions with a fair amount of that sort of colour which isn’t actually filth but from afar it doesn’t look very appealing, but the wind was so strong from the side that it seemed to literally be pushing the bad water away from us as the tide flooded in.

Thanks to Nick S’s comment I rigged up my SSS exactly as you can see above, and within about five minutes of starting fishing I felt one of those swipes on my lure which feels to me like a bass is flanking it with its gills. A second later and I got that proper thump which I believe is the fish coming back in to hoover up its wounded prey, but in all that turbulence the hook didn’t stick and I think I might have said a couple of bad words. We carried on fishing and moving around to access the better water and deal with the vicious winds and wraparound swell rolling in at us. I always keep an eye on whoever I fish with because why on earth would you not, and one thing I always notice with Mark is how good he is at covering the sort of close in water that I know a lot of anglers would ignore.

At one point I was watching him literally time his casts to allow for a wave rolling in over the reef so he could access the water rushing back out. I have put an arrow to show the lure going out in the photo above - note the timing with that wave rolling in. If there is one thing that the SSS is seriously good at it’s literally “gripping” the backs of waves and water rushing out like this, and eventually I heard a yelp from Mark who was into this chunky fish you can see in these photos. It wasn’t going down as the most epic of bass fishing sessions, but with the vile weather and the conditions we found I was perfectly content to get a hit on my slightly different cheb-tastic setup, and of course the fact that Mark landed a fish made the session for me.

It was very noticeable how effectively the paddletails were fishing in some very bouncy conditions over some very shallow ground. I was using one of those 10g Vike Tungsten cheb weights I told you about the other day and my 15cm SSS was casting pretty damn well in the wind. Even in all that wind and turbulence I could feel so much kick from the lure. I also really liked how easy it was to bump the lure along the bottom if need be as well. I started down this particular rabbit hole because I sensed there was something useful at the bottom of it. I think I have arrived at various easy to do options which give me another string to my bow and really give the Slender Scoop Shad a lot more action than the plenty of action it already has. Now to see what other soft plastics might respond to this style of rigging. You all have a good weekend and let’s see where the England rugby team is at before the World Cup. I am still buzzing from what has to have been one of the most epic Ashes cricket series ever………………….

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