I guess you would also turn away from hitting the lure if you suddenly saw me looming over you!

We were out the other day on the hunt for decent looking water, and whilst we didn’t exactly cover ourselves in glory it was fascinating to be fishing various locations I had never seen before. I’d set my alarm for 4am, but because we are all a bit bombed out and we always get excited about going fishing, I had woken up at 3.30am instead. The previous morning was 3.45am because I woke up and got to wondering how the England v New Zealand cricket was going on down in New Zealand - which got me up and downstairs to listen to the end of the day’s play on the TalkSport app on my phone. Can I blame a bit of tiredness for not quite thinking straight?

We ended up at the end of an interesting looking creek as the tide was flooding. As the water crept in we began to see signs of mullet, and up an estuary you know how often bass are in with mullet. So we had a chance. I had been fishing for most of the morning with either the MegaBass Sleeper Craw or a Tokyo-rigged Savage Gear 3D Reaction Crayfish (9.1cm 7.5g) creature bait (thanks Danny for getting me thinking about the Tokyo rig again as a way of presenting certain soft plastics). The lads I was fishing with were also swapping over to that interesting MegaBass Dark Sleeper at various times, but I had a different option in my lure box…………

The slightly narrower and smaller-profile, ready-to-fish Z-Man Gobius 3’’ 1/2oz (essentially 14g, remember not to mix these lures with anything else). I am quite surprised by how well this little thing casts, but perhaps of more importance is how accurately you can put it into specific spots. I don’t have much experience with this Z-Man lure, but I do intentionally slacken off my drag a touch if I clip it on. I am not sure I trust the smaller hook in the lure if a properly big bass grabs it and I give it the normal sort of grief I would with a “regular” sort of hook we might use for bass fishing. I do like a lot of the smaller lures for some bass fishing situations though, and if that means I need to be a bit more sensible with smaller hooks then so be it.

So Henry here “creeps” closer to the edge of the water and flicks his Z-Man Gobius out across the creek. I can feel that distinct tab when the lure hits the bottom and I start a simple sort of wind and pause, wind and pause retrieve, with my rod tip up. I’m trying to learn about how I might better present and fish lures like these because I subscribe to smaller lures in subtler situations especially. I near the end of the retrieve and suddenly right there in front of me is a good looking bass coming in after my lure. Muggins here leans even further out to try and get a good look at the fish, and in turn the fish turns at the lure, obviously sees me peering out over the water - and sods right off! We found some good looking water but idiot me went and blew his best shot at a fish. For sure it’s increased my confidence levels that a lure like that does (nearly) work in an estuary based situation like we were fishing, but it then kinda helps if the angler - me - does things a bit more stealthily. Lesson learned!

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