How often do fish refuse our lures but we never even know about it? (some rather interesting video footage!)

I don’t know about you, but the whole “I’ve just had a follow/refusal” thing has always freaked me out a fair bit because I can’t help but wonder how long that fish which refused my lure might have been following it. Did the bass home in on my lure and track it almost to my feet where it saw me and turned away, or did the bass almost pounce right at the last moment but instinct told him or her to refuse? If I had been fishing with a different lure would I have hooked that fish? And so on………..

I can so vividly remember when I first started fishing with the IMA Komomo SF-125 lure. Not only did I realise that there were actually hard lures out there which I could effectively not snag up all the time over shallow ground, but on about my first or second session with the lure I had a rather nice bass literally almost beach itself on the reef at my feet as it tried to grab the lure. But did it try and grab the lure or did it mistime its refusal? You know the way my head works!

Anyway, so the whole follow/refusal thing has always done me in, but after our Savage Gear related filming over in Ireland a few months ago, it’s gone to another level of messing with my head! The actual bass fishing was pretty tough but we got what we needed so we also did some pollack and wrasse fishing from the shore. The filming lads had brought over one of those (slightly dubious looking, tee hee!) Water Wolf 2.0 cameras which are designed to be used underwater and which I had only seen bits of mostly pike hitting trolled lures footage of online. Because we had enough people though, it was decided to try and get some footage of pollack and wrasse hopefully hitting the lures.

So when we were back at the ranch and looking through the Water Wolf 2.0 footage, it was immediately evident that too much of it was going to make the viewer seasick with how it rolls around on the retrieve. But when you really scrubbed carefully through the footage there were enough relatively stable sequences to be able to cut into relevant videos if need be. It’s not a particularly easy camera to use with how you need to set it up and shoot blind and so on, but over a bit of time the lads got to grips with how it could be used for pollack and wrasse, and we ended up with some half-decent 1080p footage of lures dropping and bumping along the bottom through weed and over rocks etc.

But we also saw fish, and what was very apparent was firstly how many fish could be around when you might think there were none, secondly how many times the fish would come up to the lures, check them out, but then swim away or sometimes nip the lure itself before swimming away, and thirdly how wrasse definitely do chase lures down and they aren’t merely hitting the lures because they are in their territory and it’s an aggression thing as some anglers claim (without actually knowing). There were a few times when the pollack fishing especially went rather quiet but the Water Wolf 2.0 underwater camera was showing plenty of fish around but for some reason they weren’t interested in nailing the lures.

Which brings me back around to bass fishing and how often we might be blanking away but there are actually a few bass around and we never even knew it. Fish obviously aren’t going to eat all the time, and especially when some random lure swims past them trying to look appetising, but it’s the whole “blanked because there were no fish around” thing which gets me thinking here. Did I blank because there really were no bass around and I made the wrong call on where to fish? Did I blank but there were bass around and I was there at the wrong state of tide or the fish had fed recently and didn’t need to again for a while? Or did I blank because whatever lure I had been fishing was the wrong one, or the colour wasn’t right, or was I potentially fishing the right kind of lure but I wasn’t fishing it right? I hear good striped bass anglers talking more about fishing lures “right” than we tend to do. Put all this together and it’s yet another piece of the overall puzzle which continues to fascinate me because I know that I will rarely actually know, and yet again it’s why I take so little notice of anglers who deal only in definites………..

I put this blog post up and literally 30mins later a WhatsApp message came through from John Quinlan, the lad who I do the guiding work with in Ireland - with the video footage above. He was out guiding a couple of days ago and one of his clients had a follow from a big bass, but nothing was doing in some calm and clear conditions. When the guys broke for lunch, John took the Water Wolf 2.0 camera that the Savage Gear guys had kindly left for him and gave it a swim with a lure clipped on the end of it. Yep, there were rather a lot of bass chasing the lure but not hitting it, and without the camera nobody would ever have known! Makes you think………….

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