Apologies in advance if this ends up as a bit of a rambling blog post, but for numerous reasons I am always interested in dialling down a bit into the lures we might turn to for our bass fishing - why we might use them, what specific lures can do for us, me trying to carry as much variety with me when I am fishing but also trying to carry as few lures as possible, etc. I will reveal all shortly, but I am finally getting the chance to actually be involved with design and input into the gear we might use, and I am finding it almost beyond fascinating…………….

I am sure we all use any number of different lures to do different things for us, and these are my “needs” as such from my various soft plastics - and please, what I use myself is merely what I like and trust and there are any number of lures out there that can do similar things for you. If I work through the water column from surface to bottom then as it currently stands I want a soft plastic for a simple straight retrieve either on or near the surface, a twitchbait style soft plastic for working nice and shallow, a paddletail I can swim just below the surface, a paddletail I can swim at various depths, some kind of soft plastic I can rig on a jig head or perhaps cheburashka-style and bump it along the bottom in current, and then a paddletail I can either bump down the current or swim/work along the bottom which might be from clean to horribly snaggy). Yep, there are of course plenty of other ways to fish soft plastics for bass, but I reckon that’s where I’m at right now.

And for the most part I need to turn to a few specific and different soft plastics to cover that range of fishing for me. If I look at my lures right now then I reckon these are the soft plastics I use the most to cover the above requirements - the OSP DoLive Stick 6'' on a slow straight retrieve and twitching it around kind of thing, the Wave Fishing 5’’ Bamboo Stick on a straight retrieve at night especially, the OSP DoLive Shad 4.5’’ or MegaBass Spindle Worm 5’’ paddletails for swimming nice and shallow (but I am starting to really like these cheap as chips Noeby Scented Phat Minnows as well), the MegaBass X-Layer 4.5’’ but damn they are not cheap so I have tended to cut a senko down to about 5’’ long and insert a rattle in it for bumping down the current on a fixed jig head or attach one of those rather clever cheburashka ones, the Savage Gear Sandeel in various sizes as a “swimming-style” paddletail that I can fish at various depths, and finally the killer Fiiish Black Minnow as THE paddletail I turn to for working along the bottom especially - sand, rock, current etc.

A cut-down senko mounted on a jig head for bumping down the current

I am not complaining by the way because of course we can’t expect one single lure to do all of the above for us, but if I look at all the lures above then can I get some of them to do more for me? The answer is of course a big chunky soft plastic yes - a DoLive likes being on a jig head for example - but in a roundabout way I think it again highlights yet again how clever the Black Minnow “system” was and how the experts missed the point because experts forget what it’s like to be confused by fishing and us mere mortals found it really useful that here was a paddletail “system” which was giving us the correct size lure bodies with the right size of jig head and the right size weedless hook. No messing around wondering what sodding jig heads to buy for different kinds of lures, and is that weedless hook the right sort of size for the lure. In certain respects the Savage Gear Sandeel works along similar principals - specific jig heads for specific lure body lengths, designed to work together - but of the actual shape of the various jig heads to me lends these lures towards different uses. I like the shape of the Shore jig heads from Fiiish for working along any kind of sea bed for example, whereas I prefer the more pointed design of the Savage Gear Sandeel jig head when I am “swimming” a paddletail much like I’d retrieve all manner of hard lures. I also like the Offshore jig head from Fiiish for “swimming” the Black Minnow, but then I prefer the way the Savage Gear Sandeel looks in the water at faster speeds over the Black Minnow which to be fair was never designed to be fished quickly - and so on.

In a perfect world I’d be buying and carrying less kinds of soft plastics because they could do more for me, and of course I tailor what I take to where I’m going fishing, but I personally think that with more and more of us turning to soft plastics for so much of our lure fishing, I can’t help but wonder where we might be able to go with all this. Is it the actual design of the lure or is it the thought processes behind how we might use those lures because we could get access to specific components that help us to improve the usefulness of certain lures? I love a shiny next lure just as much as the next angler, but a floating surface lure isn’t going to do much for you along the bottom and a shallow-diver isn’t suddenly going to start biting in to really rough seas because you have managed to get it to dive another metre deep or so. Look where we are at now with soft plastics for bass fishing, and then look back say ten years to where we were then - where might we be another few years down the line? Yep, you guess right, I woke up at 4.30am this morning with a serious case of bouncing brain syndrome!

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How versatile do you want a soft plastic to be, or how happy are you to chop and change soft plastics depending on how and where you’re fishing?

© Henry Gilbey 2023