I can’t get enough of these SG Sandeel Pencil lures for more and more bass fishing situations (I am doing some work with Savage Gear so please take this as you will)

A lot of us here live in the UK and we err towards cynicism at the best of times, but I am doing my best to make you aware that, just like when I was doing some work with the lovely Fiiish people over in France, I am currently doing some work with the fishing tackle company Savage Gear. Seriously loving what I am getting to do with them aside, I have always talked about lure fishing tackle on here anyway. I can’t prove to you that the grownups at a company like Savage Gear would never ask or demand that I write blog posts about their products, but if that was a part of my remit I would not be working with them. I understand completely that some of you want to smell a rat if and when I might talk about Savage Gear stuff on here, but at the end of the day we are making some stuff that I am seriously liking for my bass fishing and I want to talk about it here on my blog because I believe that enough of you are interested and and that you trust me enough to be completely honest. If you want to believe otherwise then so be it. Anyway, that’s enough of a disclaimer for now.

But when I say “we are making some stuff”, I am nothing (yet) to do with these Savage Gear Sandeel Pencil lures and I can’t (yet) talk about future colours and rigging options and what have you. For sure I got in touch with one of the grownups I happen to know at Savage Gear HG here in the UK not long after the Line-Thru Sandeels came out to ask that they please, please make a fixed-hook version of these perfect sandeel imitations for us bass anglers who didn’t need the extra fiddling around of the line-through rigging - but I am pretty damn sure it wasn’t only me who was asking for what is now the SG Sandeel Pencil lure. I blogged about these lures the other day for my night fishing - check here - and then I made reference to them with regards to retrieve speeds at night in a blog post here. Yep, these frigging missile like lures have fast become something that I don’t tend to leave out my two medium size washable lure boxes that come bass fishing with me, and the more I fish with them, the more I am learning about them. It seems to me that bass are inshore to feed on sandeels a lot of the time so it seems pretty logical to me to be drawn to very sandeel-type lures regardless of who makes them.

We had a situation on Friday afternoon when there was a bunch of bass (not big but what can you do?) in front of us and although there was a lot of weed in the water it was just about fishable - with thanks to a kind angler I know who gets me thinking about this particular mark that I have fished a lot in a bit of a different way. Anyway, Aaron was fishing with the long-casting and rather deadly pearl white Albie Snax and getting plenty of interest, and I was using some white coloured sample soft plastics and also doing well which made my week because little in fishing floats my boat as much as catching on new or sample lures and learning more about how they work and the options they might give me. Aaron then spotted some terns working but they were way out of reach of our soft plastics. I clipped on a new to me metal lure that to be honest I had in my lure box because I wanted to take a few close up photos of it at some point during this session. I had not intended actually fishing with it on Friday, but I fancied it being able to reach the birds and sure enough I hooked up on my first cast with this lure and I think I yelped with excitement.

More and more weed was moving in with the tide though, and after hooking a couple of bass under those terns it was time to move around. I went west and Aaron went east, but pretty quickly I realised that in front of where I had moved to it was as good as unfishable with the amount of weed about. I could see Aaron still fishing though so I scrambled on over to him. There was still plenty of weed in close, but how about further out? If you are reading this and you keep an eye on my blog then you will know how much I obsess about various soft plastics and how something like the DoLive Stick or indeed these samples I have here which I can’t yet talk about are fishing with such subtle actions in the water. As good as so many soft plastics are though, when you want to fish them rigged weedless and weightless, or even with a belly-weighted hook, there is obviously a limit to how far you can cast them, and into the wind especially - and I needed to see if I could get past the bulk of the weed.

And I increasingly look to hard lures like these Sandeel Pencils which swim with a subtle kind of “shimmer” as being not unlike some of the soft plastics I might fish with, but of course with the ability to put them out a lot further if need be. There are of course a bunch of more subtle hard lures which could in some respects be thought of as “long range soft plastics” with how they swim, and I could have put something like a Hound Glide or indeed a SG Seeker on. I didn’t have a Seeker with me though, and as regards a regular hard lure, I wanted as few hook points in the water as possible because of the weed. I am finding that the heavier and larger profile 30g Sandeel Pencil 150 gets out there the best when I am fishing with a heavier class of lure rod that can really get the thing moving on the cast - 15-45g, that sort of thing - and then the smaller Sandeel Pencil 90 and Sandeel Pencil 125 are the ones I carry when I am fishing with a more regular lure rod which can more easily move these lures at the casting speed they need to really fly.

And it worked. Which was nice. It’s almost not fair how well the 19g Sandeel Pencil 125 gets out there with even a bit of a flick, and I quickly found the (small) bass again, indeed at times I could see them flashing and slashing at the lure at range. You can do various things with a lure like this, but I was simply whacking it out and winding it in and the bass were jumping on it. There is nothing remotely revolutionary about these Sandeel Pencils as such, but I like what they do and the options they give me, and when I go back to when I first got some samples last year to where I am with them now, I am finding far more uses for them than I had previously envisaged. Please, please, please, there are other lures out there that can do similar things for you, but I am working with Savage Gear and I get to work on a bunch of ideas on various potential modifications and colours and rigging options and so on. I really like being able to get involved with the design process on various bass fishing lures and if I get my way we are at day one with the Sandeel Pencil and there will hopefully be plenty more lure tartery to come………..

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