If you ever see me out fishing you will notice that I don’t look much like a fish. I try my absolute best to think like a fish most of the time, but an actual fish I am not. One of the heart pills I am on for life causes me to feel like I am dreaming very vividly literally all night long, and I woke up at 4am this morning - bloody clock changes! - knowing that I had been dreaming about fishing. Yet again. It doesn’t get any easier…………..

Anyway, I was listening to an interesting podcast episode about striped bass fishing the other day. We obviously don’t have striped bass here in the UK, but I do find it interesting to learn more about how US and Canadian anglers chase these fine fish because they are often direct parallels as regards ground and techniques and so on. This particular angler in this podcast episode alluded to white being far and away his favourite lure colour - something I happen to agree with. We can never really prove what works the absolute best I suppose, but if you fish a lot you’re going to gravitate towards certain things. I really like white lures and I can talk myself into a white lure in many different bass fishing situations. The more bass I catch on white lures, the more I convince myself how well this colour works.

For some reason though I have pretty much convinced myself that when bass are feeding head-down, a darker shade of lure tends to work the best. My “theory” of course comes from nothing more scientific than a lot of fishing time and me catching more bass on the bottom on darker lure colours than brighter lure colours. Which in turn is surely self-perpetuating. If I think that I have a better chance of catching bass on the bottom with a darker lure colour, I am obviously going to clip on a darker lure colour when I am fishing like this. The more bass I catch on darker colour lures when I am fishing the bottom, the more I convince myself how well this approach works.

When I fish with creature baits I tend to clip on something with darker tones. My head tells me that the bass are rooting around that bit more deliberately and they are more likely to hit something which looks a bit more natural (I know, cotton candy hard lures!). I happen to have a packet of the brilliant Z-Man Turbo CrawZ 4'' creature baits in a bright pearl colour that I must have bought on a whim some time ago, but I haven’t yet plucked up the courage to fish them where I would usually fish with the creature baits (surely it’s getting to the stage when I should be calling them crab lures or something like that?). I’m going to turn to the darker (more crab-like?) colours because I feel so confident with them.

This is the end gear I am currently using for the creature bait stuff

When I am fishing rough ground and I am bumping the bottom with a jig head weighted paddletail like the killer Savage Gear Sandeel V2 Weedless, I am nearly always turning to the darker colours. But if I am swimming the lure more like I would a hard lure? Yep, I will often start with the (brighter) White Pearl Silver or the Khaki colours, then go from there. When we used to bump soft plastics on jig heads and smash a lot of bass on some specific Irish marks, the lure of choice was often the MegaBass XLayer in the Ayu colour. Why? Because it worked, but things obviously work a bit in reverse here. You pick a colour, it starts working, then you work backwards a bit because you have now convinced yourself that it’s the best colour - when you are the one who picked it out in the first place, not the fish!

I wasn’t going to go fishing the other day, but I literally stumbled across two packets of these Savage Gear NED Dragontail Slug lures which I am currently obsessing about because they are working so well. These two particular packets which I must have got from somebody within Savage Gear stood out so much because they were two colours which I would not have picked out if I was going to bump these lures along the bottom on a cheb rig. Then my brain starts bouncing.

I was on my own and I just felt seeing what might happen, rather than doing what I would more usually do on this particular mark - which is to bump these Savage Gear NED Dragontail Slugs along the bottom in a run of current. It’s been working well recently, and various darker colours of these lures have been producing bass. So I have naturally convinced myself that when I fish these lures like this - bumped along the bottom - the bass prefer the darker colours when the lure is tight to the sea bed. And yes, there might be some coincidence that before I found these two random packets of the lures, the only colours I owned were the darker ones. But hey, I am trying to think like a fish!

Yep, you guessed it, the bass I caught on this particular session came to the brighter coloured Savage Gear NED Dragontail Slugs, fished tight to the bottom. If I had blanked I would have naturally convinced myself that my “gambling” on the brighter colours when fishing this specific technique was the reason for the blank, but it didn’t work out like that. I guess what I am getting at is who the hell really knows? The experts might tell you that you have to fish a specific colour in a specific situation, but my own non-experty thinking is that if you asked a sample of one hundred bass anglers what lure colour they would turn to in different situations, you will end up with a frazzled brain! Take my heart attack pills and you too could dream about this sort of stuff every single night……………..

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I convince myself that this sort of lure colour works best for me in a specific situation, then this goes and happens

© Henry Gilbey 2023