I look in my lure boxes with a growing suspicion that I should be carrying more darker coloured lures, and I blame the Black Pearl coloured SG Seeker for this

This is going to get tedious but we live in the UK and we tend to err towards cynicism - yes I am doing some paid work with Savage Gear but I am hoping that most of you reading this are doing so because you trust me, and if you don’t then so be it. My findings if you like with their Black Pearl coloured 28g Seeker metal lure came well before I began working with them and my starting to think more about darker coloured lures at certain times of the day could have come about via any number of lures but by chance it happened to be via the Seeker. The heavier 28g and 32g Seekers were very hard to find for a long period of time - yes, it was me who pushed and pushed to get them back on the market - so I guess I was carrying a Black Pearl coloured version one morning last year quite simply because it was a 28g Seeker that I owned and I didn’t have many to choose from………………

I have SO much to learn about surf based lure fishing for bass, but I know already that it’s about as much of a blast as fishing gets for me, and for reasons which I guess centre around bait shoals, we were often catching the biggest numbers of bass early in the morning. I guess I tend to default to lighter colours of hard and soft lures because my head is telling me most prey species our bass might chase have a darker top and a lighter belly. I love white lures at night and also in bright sunshine for example, and my SG Seeker of choice has tended to be the White Pearl colour because in all that fizz it makes sense to me. I have caught plenty of bass in the surf on this colour metal and I hope to catch plenty more, but one morning last year I was standing in the surf very early in the morning, and I thought what the hell, why not try a different colour?

Some anglers chase big bass and claim not to enjoy catching the smaller fish, and some anglers love catching as many bass as possible but how anybody manages to accurately count the fish they catch in a session is beyond me! Fishing for me is a mix of so many things which make it the obsession it is, but one thing I will always do is play around with different things if I get in amongst a stack of fish. I don’t personally see the point in catching fish after fish after fish if I can’t use the situation to learn something - and that learning something new in a situation like that often revolves around taking the successful lure off and putting something different on.

I have told you on here before about how a few early mornings last year the Black Pearl colour Savage Gear Seeker and indeed the Black Silver or Black&Red UV SG Sandeel Pencil without a doubt sorted out a load of bass when the lighter coloured lures weren’t working. Loads of lures work in the surf but it only makes sense if I refer to the ones I use myself. If I had been on my own I wouldn’t really have been able to prove anything, but when you’re standing close to a couple of anglers and you’re catching bass on a dark colour and they aren’t on a bright colour, and then you give them your dark lure and they instantly start catching, well that’s good enough for me. It happened a few times just as it started to get light, and it was interesting to see how this “darker lure” period seemed to last perhaps an hour or so and then as the sky got visibly brighter and you didn’t need a headlamp to pick a lure colour in your box the bass would happily start hitting brighter lures again.

Now if there is one thing that the middle of February and a run of truly appalling weather gets me doing it’s thinking about the bass season ahead. I have read plenty about black lures being the traditional colour of lure for night fishing but on dark nights especially I feel incredibly confident with white lures. One of my aims this year is to try and catch bass consistently under brighter moon conditions, and I’m going to try darker lures when I head out and do this. But what about those early mornings when it’s not actually still dark but it’s definitely not light yet? What about those periods in the evenings before it gets dark when you’ve lost any glare or brightness on the water?

This year I am going to change things up a bit if a session is going to involve those first or last light periods. I don’t need to be carrying a big variety of hard lures which do the same or at least a very similar thing, but I am interested to put say a very dark coloured shallow diver in my box when I would most likely not have done so before. The same with soft plastics, indeed if I think back to a particular bass I lost which still haunts me a bit, I am pretty damn sure it was on that black colour Fiiish Black Minnow bumped along a shallow bit of reef - and it was in that very early morning period when I still needed a bit of light to move around over the rocks and not end up on my backside.

I don’t routinely carry dark colours of the OSP DoLive Stick for example, and if I check out the paddletails which I would rig weedless and either weightless or with a belly-weighted hook and swim them really shallow, I can’t actually find a dark colour in there at the moment. I intend to change that. I have cried many tears of joy that the IMA Hound 125F Glide is becoming more available again in the UK, but when did I ever think about buying one in a colour like this one here for example?

As I have said many times before, if there is one thing I enjoy doing with my fishing it’s trying something different, and I am determined this year to take what I have found in my surf fishing and see if some of those factors translate over to other types of lure fishing for bass. I have asked around on Facebook recently and a number of anglers kindly replied about how they will often use darker lures at first and last light and of course I can’t help but wonder if I am continuing to miss a number of tricks. This is the whole crux of fishing to me, the constant drive to get better and better at it, and then I start thinking about dark coloured lures in murky water when in the past I have defaulted to whites and pearls and chartreuse and big rattles and what have you. The weather and time of year may well be a pile of poo, but damn it gets me thinking about things! Hell, I’ve been up since 3.15am with my bouncing brain syndrome, thinking about darker coloured lures and also can we beat Ireland in the Six Nations the weekend after next?

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