Back in the day when practically every single lure was new to me and I was losing a fair few of them because I didn’t know enough about the depths at which various lures would swim and so on, I came across the IMA brand. From memory I first saw them at the first Nantes show I went to - Sakura was doing IMA lures in France at the time - but it wasn’t until my mate Nick brought some into the UK for their basslures website that I got the chance to fish with some. For a number of years running I was employed to shout about lure fishing stuff at “interested?” visitors at the CLA Game Fair, and one year basslures had a stand there…………..

My first ever IMA Komomo SF-125. I tend to photograph a new lure before I take it out fishing in case I go and lose it.

So I wandered over as nonchalantly as I could, but to be honest the bass lure fishing thing had completely taken hold by then and the shiny stuff was becoming more and more of an issue. I can remember the my first two IMA lures I managed to pick up from the basslures stand that year - the Komomo SF-125 in cotton candy and a Sasuke 140 in what I think was that “Sand Bora” (sandeel) colour. Into my box they went and almost the next day I was away to the south east coast of Ireland on a bass fishing trip. Bear in mind that my knowledge of what different hard lures could or could not do for me was in its infancy, but pretty quickly I got very excited about how I could fish the Komomo SF-125 over some shallow ground and not lose it. I was drawn to the cotton candy colour because of how well that now discontinued Maria Chase BW lure in the Holo Silver colour had done for me, and on that first Ireland trip with my first ever SF-125 it quickly became apparent that for some weird reason the cotton candy colour worked particularly well in brighter conditions. I have such a strong mental image of a really good bass almost beaching itself on a flat rock right in front of me as it chased my SF-125 right into my feet on that trip, and the IMA Komomo SF-125 has been a firm favourite, go-to shallow-diver ever since.

But what about the slightly weird looking IMA Sasuke 140 lure? I knew squat back then about the bottle-nose plugs from the US striped bass fishing scene and from which the IMA lure designers had I guess borrowed some ideas for their Sasuke range of lures which has now grown to any number of different models, and this Sasuke 140 looked very different to anything else I had been fishing with. About half way through that Irish trip and I hadn’t even clipped this brand new lure on though because it looked so nice and I was worried about losing it, but one morning we were fishing a spot which has some deeper water and on its day would fish its socks off for bass. There’s a lot of ground to cover and on this particular morning I got to a specific part of the mark where there is a pretty big, deep rockpool, and then some really nice bouldery but slightly deeper ground right next to it. We had caught a few bass already and now was the time to get the new lure on and see what it did.

I had no idea what it looked like in the water though, so I went over to the rockpool, clipped on my brand new and only IMA Sasuke 140, and lobbed it in. Damn that thing looked nice when I wound it on, so I had another couple of goes, lifted the Sasuke from the rockpool, and turned around to cast it for real into the sea. You know how some specific moments in fishing stick in your head like glue? I could show you exactly where this rockpool is, exactly where I stood to make that first cast with my brand new shiny lure, and exactly the line of my cast to get me in behind some of the big boulders with those lovely deep gullies in between them. Out goes my brand new Sasuke for its first ever swim.

My mate Andy fishing the exact spot where I got nailed. You can see the rockpool in the bottom left of the photo.

And it only went and got nailed. This fish smashed into my brand new Sasuke 140 on my very first proper cast with it, and wow this fish was a train. You know when you can’t even strike because a fish just nails you and charges off almost instantaneously? This was one of those times. What I am sure was a bass (although we have also had some good pollack from this mark) steamed off and there’s me standing there with line coming off my reel, it feels like a really serious fish, and I am instantly in love with my new lure - but then the fish very suddenly comes off and I am left standing there in a state of shock and wondering what the hell just happened. There are any number of different bass lures that we can more easily get our hands on these days, but it’s sessions and trips away like that which firmly put the IMA brand of hard lures right up there in the can’t be without them category for me. Damn I’d have loved to see the fish which didn’t stay hooked up that morning, and whenever I clip on a Sasuke 140 or the arguably even more effective, smaller IMA Sasuke 120 lure these days, I can’t help but think of my very first cast with it………….

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Have you ever hooked a donkey on your very first cast with a brand new lure?

© Henry Gilbey 2023