I haven’t been lure fishing for that long and I wonder how bass anglers were targeting fish back in the good old days over some of the ground we now treat as normal

Take the shallowest, most snag-infested bit of rough ground you might routinely lure fish for bass and then think about the lures you are using to successfully deal with locations like these. Are they what we might call more “modern lures” which might cast a long way but still swim incredibly shallow for example, or are they some soft plastics which not that many years ago were never even seen here in the UK or Ireland? I don’t have a lifelong bank of lure fishing experience and knowledge to call upon here, but sometimes I get to wondering how lure anglers might have fished shallow reefs and so on “back in the day”.................

I think back to when a seriously talented and incredibly kind UK angler who was living in SE Ireland at the time emailed me out of the blue and helped me (ruined me?!) get into this complete and utter obsession with chucking lures out for our glorious bass. From memory his go-to shallow diver of choice at the time was the Storm Jointed Thunderstick which I know he caught incredible numbers of fish on but cast like a banana. I can’t for the life of me remember how the sadly discontinued Maria Chase BW in that holographic silver colour came to be in my lure boxes back then, but for a while it was one of the only hard lures I owned and fished with. I didn’t have any experience of other hard lures to realise how it didn’t actually cast very well, and as this lad got me into fishing a lot of shallow reefs, I was then forced to start looking at other, shallower swimming hard lures because the Maria Chase kept snagging up. And yes, I do wonder what we might have caught back then if we had known about weedless rigged soft plastics, and so on.

So how were anglers targeting bass over ground like this back when there weren’t the sort of lures available that we kinda take for granted these days? I can still remember the lightbulb moment a few years after starting off in SE Ireland when another friend introduced me to one of those Wave Worm senkos on a trip to the Dungarvan area. Over the course of that week I began to work out how a simple soft plastic like this could be rigged and then fished over even more ground that I had ever thought possible, to the point that I could now fish some sections of big reef systems that I had previously avoided because I kept losing hard lures.

When senkos and what have you were not around and the Rapala J-13 was so popular, how were bass anglers fishing ground like this for example? Or were they not? Are these more modern hard and soft lures helping us to fish for bass at locations that might previously not been properly targeted, or has bass fishing always been like it currently is and little has actually moved forward? Trying to put a J-13 out into rough weather and then blasting say a Hound Glide is like chalk and cheese - and yes, it can always be argued that there were more bass around back in the day - but is modern lure design helping us to explore more ground and techniques and so on? Even with my limited knowledge of lure fishing for bass “back then”, it seems to me that more anglers are catching bass these days in a wider variety of locations, via more methods and techniques, and especially for longer “seasons” each year. What really breaks my head though is when I think about taking these lures and techniques we might routinely use now and then applying them to a healthier population of more and bigger bass.

I hope you’re all safe and well after that storm over the weekend. It was pretty wild here in SE Cornwall but I am not sure we copped the worst of it. I read this morning that they recorded a 97MPH gust of wind off the Needles in the Isle of Wight which is quite something. As for the rugby? Holy cow those were some properly horrible conditions for the Calcutta Cup and I’ll take that win and let’s see how the Ireland match goes in a couple of weeks. Where is England rugby right now? Your guess is as good as mine, but at least it’s in a better place than poor Italy who perhaps should not be in the Six Nations at all.