Had such a blast with our first group of anglers

I don’t want to embarrass our clients who left us yesterday, but the four days we had with them were a huge amount of fun, and the experience yet again reinforces my long held belief that the majority of people who are into fishing are a blast to spend time with. As a guided fishing operation we are never going to promise loads of big bass or anything daft like that, but we do assure our people that we will work our butts off to try and find some fish whatever the conditions are and we are here to help as much as people want with techniques and advice. We will also spend a lot of time laughing and having a huge amount of fun…………

Which we did. We have had all sorts of conditions - including a fair amount of mucky water which seemed to follow us around - but we found bass for them all, we had a hell of a lot of fun bashing a bunch of wrasse one afternoon mainly on the killer 120mm Fiiish Black Minnows (okay, they are too expensive to “waste” on wrasse, but if you want to find out if there are any wrasse around then damn they work!), and in the last half hour of their last session with us on Saturday evening, one of the lads landed his best ever bass at somewhere over the 6lb mark, as per above. Holy cow it slammed the Hound Glide in a hell of a run of current, and the scrap was fantastic - it’s a hell of a buzz helping and watching good people catch fish in such a special part of the world as this, and especially when the light goes off as it did yesterday evening. I get to come to Kerry for some of my work and I still pinch myself.

Now this wasn’t meant to be a blog post about lures, but bloody hell it’s frustrating when a hard lure which we turn to so often on our co-guiding trips because it works again and again in such a wide variety of conditions and locations has to the best of my knowledge been discontinued. I am assuming here that because IMA Japan no longer list any of the Hound family of hard lures on their website the IMA Hound 125F Glide is no longer being produced. From time to time it seems that a few shops manage to find current stock of these lures, but I keep hoping that IMA over in Japan will have sympathy on us UK and Irish anglers and make these killer lures again.

Nope, the Hound Glide isn’t doing anything unique in the water, but it’s just such a good lure to get our clients to clip on in a bunch of different situations - they cast a mile, they “grip” so well in all kinds of sea conditions, they also work very well in current, and they keep on producing bass, including the biggest bass I have ever seen from the shore, caught by one of our lads around this time last year - see here. I don’t feel comfortable with lure copies from an ethical point of view, but I refuse not to have at least one Hound Glide in my box when I go fishing myself or I am carrying a selection of lures for our clients, so with this particular lure I have no choice these days. By miles the best copy I have fished with is the Payo Perca 125 Mac Tune Floating Jerkbait, indeed the hooks and split rings I think are better than on the original, and then my second choice would be the HTO Canine, but make sure to bin the truly awful hooks and split rings and re-rig. The one hard lure which has been creeping up on me this year as a very effective alternative to the Hound Glide is the incredibly long-casting and well made Shimano Exsence Silent Assassin 129F (there is also a slightly heavier and longer-casting again Sinking version). These lures can be hard to get hold of at times, but the increasing number of Shimano Japan hard lures I have fished with now are worming their way into my lure box more and more with how well they cast, how well they are made, and how well they work for our bass.

Anyway, on here today are a bunch of photos that I shot with our first group out here in Kerry, and this morning are heading out with our next lot of anglers. It’s October and the weather forecast is a bit all over the place, but we have four days of moving around a number of different locations on the hunt for fish and it’s going to be a blast. Catch up soon…………..

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