How the brand new 30g, 35g & 40g Savage Gear Surf Seekers came to be

A few years ago I headed out to Kerry for one of these co-guided lure fishing trips I do with John Quinlan, and as you obviously do when fishing is your thing, John and I were soon talking fishing and lures and so on. We lead exciting lives eh?! John was telling me about this metal lure called a Seeker which some recent clients of his had been using to good effect on the Irish bass, and because I could not recall hearing of this lure plus I was becoming more and more interested in surf based lure fishing, I obviously asked a bunch of questions. John recounted to me how his anglers had done well on the Seekers when they had some good surf conditions, and also when fishing a strong run of current where the water isn’t particularly deep but being able to search a lot of water can be really useful at certain times. I liked the sound of these Seekers so I bought a couple when I got back home after our trip, but I remember noticing how they were not particularly easy lures to find.

So I went digging for information, and it turned out that just as I was getting interested in these Seeker things, Savage Gear had for some reason discontinued the 28g and 32g versions. I wasn’t working with Savage Gear at the time but I know a few people and I sent an email out asking if the decision to discontinue these particular weights of the Seeker could be reconsidered. I didn’t hold out much hope but from memory I think Savage Gear did eventually do a bit of a limited run of the 28g and 32g Seekers again. I managed to secure a few, and because of my growing obsession with hurling lures into a bit of surf, I ended up giving these simple metal lures a lot of water time. By no means am I some kind of surf fishing expert, but over time I did notice what the Seeker could do for me, and not just in the surf I might add.

Eventually I ended up working with Savage Gear, and our first priority was these Gravity Stick soft plastics which are now on the shelves. But we are blokes, and that means that a little bit of multi-tasking is not completely beyond us. The moment I was officially doing some work with Savage Gear and I was onto the powers that be to please make the 28g and 32g Seekers available again, but please could we have some saltwater hooks included with them. As much as these lures are useful to us, in fact the Savage Gear Seeker comes from the Scandinavian (saltwater) sea trout fishing world, and if you know nothing about this world then it’s worth some exploring for sure. Sea trout fishing in saltwater is a huge thing in some of the Scandinavian countries, and with the sort of ground they tend to fish and then how they approach this ground and sea trout themselves, I reckon there is a lot of common ground between “our” bass fishing and their sea trout fishing. Anyway, when I asked about putting saltwater hooks onto the 28g and 32g Seekers and relaunching them, I was told that yes the lures could come back onto the market, but they were going to keep the original freshwater hooks with the lures because it made sense to sell them like this and then we could re-rig as required (my understanding is that the heaviest regular Seeker ISP now available is the 28g version - the 32g version is no longer listed in the catalogue). So how about we make some Seekers specifically for the saltwater world I asked……....

There are loads of metal lures out there which can work for our bass fishing in a bunch of different scenarios, and it’s not as if I was going to try and reinvent what was to me already the perfect metal lure - the Seeker casts a mile, they are obviously not that expensive to make if we go on their prices, they can deal with any kind of sea from flat calm to raging, for a metal lure it’s pretty interesting how shallow they can be made to swim on a relatively slow retrieve, they work well on the drop and/or with spin-stops in the retrieve, the colours are good, and I don’t go out bass fishing over any ground now without at least a Seeker in my box. It has been repeatedly interesting to me how for all that many of us here might love our nice shiny hard lures which are often not remotely cheap, how many times does the cheapest lure in my box produce the goods?

The 30g, 35g and 40g lettering on the bottom of the lures is me adding it to the photo, but you can see the actual lettering with the weights on the bottom three Surf Seekers

Anyway, so my initial report about a new family of Seekers was initially based around a 35g version, and it was important to me that we try and make this heavier Seeker with a slightly larger overall profile in order to make even more of a “come and eat me” action in the water - but I very much did not want any attempt at a larger Seeker to impact upon its incredible casting ability. I have a bunch of different sample sizes and weights of Seekers here at home, and I fished with them all. Over time I came to seriously favour what is now the 35g Surf Seeker you can find in the shops (it’s made from a slightly lighter material than the regular Seeker), indeed the couple of samples I had of this lure smashed a heap of bass in the surf for me last year. My next step was to push for a lighter 30g version - essentially the same dimensions as the now discontinued 32g Seeker ISP, as per the rather awful photo above, sorry - and then how about we make a larger 40g version as well? Cue more sampling and testing, and as with the Gravity Sticks, I cannot tell you what a thrill it is to see these new Surf Seekers actually in the shops. The 30g and 35g Surf Seekers are absolute frigging missiles, and then when you step up to a more powerful lure rod and can properly move it, holy cow the 40g version gets out there and you can really feel it doing its thing in the water.

The Savage Gear grownups then asked me what colours I would like to see in this new range of Seekers, but after some more sampling I pretty quickly came to the conclusion that the original Seeker ISP colours were pretty much perfect already so why try to trick things up? We decided to go for four different colours and we would drop the Fluo UV Green Yellow colour in favour of something a bit different - the available Surf Seeker colours for the time being are White Pearl, Black Pearl, Green Silver, and the new one is a rather lovely Blue Chrome which may or may not be a bit of a joey mackerel thing. We have put a bit of a chartreuse coloured “target” at the base of each lure, but I personally like it for being able to easily tell the difference between the current Seekers and these new Surf Seekers when they are in my lure box and I am picking one out in the half-light especially. I also asked that the weight of the Surf Seeker be put on the lure, and although I need glasses these days to see the number, I know them by size and I don’t have to write the weights on them like I do with the original Seekers.

If you see any of these new Surf Seekers on a tackle shop shelf, you will notice that there are now some proper saltwater hooks included with them, and from the start with this Surf Seeker project I pushed for this to happen. I wanted to see a decent treble hook and also the sort of size and strength of single hook that can work so well in surf conditions especially, so we have gone for a #3 2X treble hook plus a #3/0 inline single hook. There is no reason you should know this, but the split rings are also bloody good.

Now I know these new Surf Seekers work well for bass in the surf, but even if we have put the word “Surf” in there, I get the impression that like me, more anglers are almost coming back if you like to simple metal lures working well in a number of different bass fishing situations and not just in the surf. I have been corresponding with a particular bass angler online for a while now, and it’s been amazing how many big bass he has been nailing on Seekers in what are very definitely not surf conditions. I don’t want to mention the guy by name and I don’t want to talk about the sort of ground where he is finding some of these bigger bass, but a while back I asked him if he would be okay with me sending him a few of the finished Surf Seekers to see how he got on with them. I know he likes a treble hook and these new Surf Seekers come rigged with that #3 treble hook and the #3/0 inline single is inside the packet and not clipped onto one of the split rings as you sometimes find on the regular Seekers. He messaged me to say thank you and the lures had arrived, and two days later I think it was he sent me a few photos that you can see here - it’s a 10lb+ bass (weighed) that he had just landed on one of these new Surf Seekers in the Pearl White, rigged with that #3 2X treble hook. As I blogged about the other day, it’s my new buzz if you like to hear from anglers who are catching bass on lures which I have been so involved with, and to hear about a double figure fish is about as good as it gets for me. You all have a good weekend……………...

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