How often does it happen that you change your lure………and bang, fish on (out in Ireland)

It will continue to fry my brain and I also accept that we will never actually know why. You’re catching nothing so you change your lure, and the first cast with the different lure goes and produces a fish. How many times has this happened to you? I spent all day Saturday driving to Kerry, and then yesterday I spent the morning getting all the lures and rods and reels and so on ready for filming from today. By about midday I had had enough so I went for a wander around the coastline to see what the conditions were like. They had some really big swells out here last week which rendered parts of the coastline unfishable, so I went to have a look………..

And certain parts of the bay were looking really rather nice, so I did the honorable thing in the name of research - I went and did a bit of fishing. I didn’t have that long but I managed to fit in three different marks to see what the water was like and so on, and I managed to catch bass from two of them. I wasn’t going to remain on a particular mark if I caught fish, so whilst it wasn’t exactly the most efficient fishing you are ever going to hear about, I didn’t really want to go hammering a spot where we might end up doing some filming this week.

Because of the ground and conditions on the first mark, I turned to the smaller Gravity Stick Paddletail on the 4/0 belly-weight hook (just noticed that these new smaller Gravity Sticks are in the warehouse, so they should be in shops and on websites sometime soon, I will keep you posted). You know how much I like white lures in bright conditions, and with the north west winds I had yesterday, I was getting bright sunshine mixed with moody dark clouds. After about forty five minutes of fishing with the white Paddletail at a state of tide I really like for where I was, I hadn’t even had a nudge. I do sometimes wonder if all the action that a paddletail can give isn’t actually always the best lure to turn to for calm conditions, so I did a bit of thinking and came up with a lure change………….

Which was the subtler Pulsetail in that stunning white holographic UV colour which spends more and more time in my lure boxes. I rigged it up on the 4/0 weedless hook without a belly weight, and on my very first cast after this lure change, a bass went and jumped on the end. Nearly an hour of covering a lot of ground with the Paddletail and then first cast with the subtler-action Pulsetail and it produces a fish. Had the bass suddenly turned up as I was changing lures? Did the action on the Paddletail put the bass off in the calmer water? Was it the subtle colour change? I will never know, but I caught my first Irish bass of the year and then moved locations, and on about my third cast with the same Pulsetail at the new mark I caught my second Irish bass of the year. The more we do this thing called fishing, the more questions we end up asking. I find it endlessly fascinating…………