I didn’t know you could get weedless hooks with such heavy belly-weights on them - Berkley Fusion19 Weight Swimbait Hooks
Try as I might to keep an eye on anything fishing tackle related which might be of use in the (sea) bass fishing world, I am a regular bloke with regular flaws, and from time to time I miss something pretty obvious which when I come across I then wonder how I did without it. I tend to use my Facebook page mainly for fishing discussions and asking questions about fishing because how other anglers do things really interests me, and it’s down to a kind Cornish angler on there who alerted me to these particular Berkley Fusion19 Weight Swimbait Hooks (weedless) hooks. You might all know about these hooks already and I am late to the party by the way!
If you went back through this blog you would notice how soft plastics have over time become an utterly essential part of my saltwater fishing, to the point in fact that I don’t obsess about hard lures which jingle and jangle anything like as much as I used to. I do still carry various hard lures because of what they can do for me, but the more I continue to learn about soft plastics in their many guises, the more I use them for my fishing in more and more situations. What was the first thing I asked Mads to help me make when I started working with Savage Gear? Soft plastics. What has my biggest bass come on? A soft plastic. Why do I obsess about a hard lure like the Sandeel Pencil SW? Because it offers me the subtle action of a soft plastic at extreme range if I need it. Yet again I have to ask how often less is actually more in bass fishing?
So this kind lad on Facebook alerted me to these Berkley Fusion19 Weight Swimbait Hooks, and as is often the case there seems to be a few variations on these hooks with naming and components and so on. I am on about the Berkley belly-weighted weedless hooks with the corkscrew for easy rigging (Berkley Fusion19 Weight Swimbait Hooks), and even then I am quite particular about my corkscrews and I prefer them with a centering pin, as per here (and yes, I replaced the corkscrews on the Berkley hooks I bought from Lizard Tackle and Bait (I keep hearing such good things about this shop), thank you to those kind people as well for talking me through the options they had in stock). From the Berkley website here these are the available sizes/weights (if you can find them):
3/0, 4g
4/0, 4g
5/0, 7g
6/0, 7g
7/0, 11g (says 10.5g on the website but 11g on the hook box)
You know that my go-to hooks for any soft plastics I can fit on them are the Savage Gear 6/0 Weedless Corkscrew hooks. These are my perfect weedless hooks. We made them for our Gravity Sticks and we did a good bit of work on choosing the 3g belly-weight because of how the different lures swim and/or drop so well with this particular weight. I have played around a fair bit with adding bits of weight to the belly-weight hooks, plus you can of course quite easily insert weight spikes into the slots which we moulded into the Gravity Sticks, but up until the other day I had never tried say the Gravity Stick Paddletail with the 7/0, 11g Berkley hook.
To my eyes the 7/0 Berkley hook is about the same size as our Savage Gear 6/0 hook, or rather the 7/0 Berkley hook sits just fine in the Gravity Sticks. The Berkley hooks have a somewhat thicker wire gauge than you would find in most of the weedless hooks we might use for our bass fishing, but this doesn’t bother me, and the actual hooks themselves seem to be really good quality with their slightly strange sounding “Smoke Satin” finish. Time will tell of course, but as per this blog post here I am no longer leaving weedless hooks pre-rigged in soft plastics, and this definitely helps with any potential rust issues. The 7/0, 11g Berkley hook in a Gravity Stick Paddletail gives you a whopping 27.4g of soft plastic lure which absolutely frigging flies if you slow down a bit and cast nice and smoothly so there is no “turnover” in flight. Less is more remember, and I would argue that this doesn’t always refer to the action of a lure.
I was interested to see if such a heavy belly-weight might adversely affect how a lure like the Gravity Stick Paddletail swims, but in the water it all looks good to me. I would imagine that with a close up camera there might be a touch less body roll and so on because of such a heavy anchor, but with how a belly-weight this heavy punches into wind and helps me “hold” a lure like this in a sidewind I am not remotely bothered. I am going to default to the 6/0, 3g belly-weight hooks whenever possible because I know how well this combination works, but for sure I am going to carry some of the Berkley hooks with me and use them when I think I need to.
I bought a packet of the 7/0, 11g and 5/0, 7g Berkley Fusion19 Weight Swimbait Hooks off Lizard Tackle and Bait, so I haven’t seen any of the others yet. I would imagine the 6/0, 7g hooks would sit just fine in the Gravity Stick soft plastics as well as the 7/0 versions (I managed to find the 6/0 ones here), but I do know that the 5/0, 7g Berkley hooks sit very nicely in a new soft plastic which I can talk about fairly soon and which casts almost stupidly well when rigged like this. This 5/0, 7g hooks also sits really well with the Slender Scoop Shad 13cms which I continue to obsess about with how good it looks in the water, and whilst I haven’t seen the 15cms version of the Slender Scoop Shad yet, I would imagine that the 7/0, 11g might play nicely with it. I happen to think that these Berkley hooks are sort of one size smaller than their numbers suggest, and this ties in with the Gravity Sticks and also these new lures which we are basing around a 4/0 weedless hook.
As I said earlier, I do still love my hard lures, but give me the opportunity to cover a huge amount of water with a biggish single (barbless) weedless hook and I am one happy bass angler. For sure you can get these heavier Berkley weedless hooks swimming that bit deeper if you slow right down, but in fact they do still swim nice and shallow at a more regular retrieve speed. I am really looking forward to using these heavier weedless hooks in some heavier surf conditions later in the year. Damn right cabin fever rages ever on, but I am also determined to catch at least a bass on a lure this March……………
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