How about using two big single hooks on hard lures in the surf?
I have blogged about using and not using single hooks on hard lures a fair amount now, indeed the title of a recentish blog post kinda states where I am at with them: “Tried and tried with singles on hard lures, annoyingly not convinced, but I reckon I’m sold on singles on my surf lures”. Now I really am 100% sold on (barbless) single hooks around the 2/0 and 3/0 size on my Savage Gear Seekers and their new Sandeel Pencil 125 lures, but on Friday morning last week for whatever reason it was a hard lure that gave me my best bass of the session around the 5lb mark (great scrap in the surf!), and the lure was rigged with a couple of barbless treble hooks……………
Which I really, really despise when surf fishing especially. Obviously I’d like to shoot a bunch of photos of a 5lb bass, but I was standing out in the surf, it was pissing down with rain, and I’d have had to radio my mate to ask him to stop fishing and come hold my fish for me for some photos I’d have struggled to shoot anyway in all that wind and rain. So I’m out there fishing and a very lively and chunky bass is coming to hand with the top treble flying around all over the place - the rear treble was in the fish’s mouth. I’m not going to get any photos of the fish so I want to stay out in the surf, unhook the fish, and get back on it. As I described the other day, I use a stronger than normal leader in the surf so that I can put a few wraps of it around my hand to help secure a hooked and often thrashing around bass, and even though those two trebles are barbless I seriously despise how they are flying around and wanting to end up in my hands or waders or jacket of what have you. I feel the same at night with treble hooks.
Give me a big barbless single hook or hooks in that situation any day of the week. Better for me, surely better for the fish, and when they go in I reckon they stay in much better than a treble, but as per that blog post I linked to above, a lot of time with mainly a single hook on the rear of many of my hard lures has left me doubtful. I wonder though - a big single hook on my main surf lures is working an absolute treat, so surely it’s time now to rig a few specific hard lures with a couple of big single hooks and give them a proper go in the surf. Most of the time I am fishing metals and so on in bigger conditions, but on Friday the surf had dropped away a fair bit from the previous morning and for some reason Gary and I did better on the hard lures.
This one’s going to get a couple of 3/0 single hooks
And for me there are two very obvious hard lures I have here which I am going to rig up with a couple of barbless single hooks and give them some surf time. You might well do a bit of surf fishing yourself and completely disagree with my own lure choices, but if I stick a couple of hard lures in a lure box for a surf fishing session then currently it’s going to be the discontinued IMA Hound Glide (good copy here but bin the hooks, best copy I have come across here, really good hooks) and increasingly the frigging lethal Shimano Exsence Silent Assassin 129 (I am just as happy with the F(loating) or the S(inking) version). The more I fish with this particular 129mm long Shimano hard lure, the more I think that it casts even better again than the already missile-like Hound Glide, and without a doubt it grips just as well in turbulent conditions. I also trust both lures completely as bass catching machines which tends to help. If I had to put a third hard lure in there than currently it’s going to be the Shimano Hirame Minnow III 125S, indeed I am going to rig the one I have here with a couple of singles and get it out there again.
As is this one
You know that I enjoy messing around with different stuff and I do wonder if I manage to nail a bunch of bass in the surf whether a great big dose of confidence will nudge me back towards rigging more of my hard lures like this. I do have a bit of a theory that a few of the really shallow-divers perhaps don’t swim quite as well with single hooks, but hard lures along the lines of the ones I mentioned in the paragraph above take singles as such just fine. Now all I need are some surf conditions in which to try this stuff out.
An apology by the way - a lot of people subscribe to this blog (thank you), but for some reason the Mailchimp stuff which I use to get the latest blog posts out like this has gone and stopped working for me. I am not quite sure why but when I get some spare time I will look into it and try to get it sorted. Thank you for your patience.
How are your nerves by the way? Can you stop thinking about 9am on Saturday morning? The many rugby related podcasts and newspaper articles this week are ratcheting up the tension to an almost unbearable level, but here’s to hoping England come out and do what they need to do on Saturday morning. Only three more sleeps……...
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