I need to get back to twitching lures around a bit more (do you find that something you used to do sometimes gets a bit forgotten?)
I know that I obsess about straight-retrieving various paddletails and the Pulsetails for a lot of my bass fishing, but talking with Marcin Kantor over those couple of days on the Copper Coast got me thinking back to how well I also used to do when I was twitching various soft plastics around. If you have read this blog for a while you will know how I obsessed about the killer OSP DoLive Stick soft plastic (still got a bag-full of them here!), then I got to help make the Savage Gear Gravity Stick Pintail and later on the smaller Pintail 120, and then when Marcin told me that the majority of his 70cm+ bass had come on soft plastic “sticks” which he fishes with a very deliberate and precise sort of animated retrieve - yep, you’ve got it, the brain started bouncing big time………….
The EvoBass Lance 150 on a Savage Gear 6/0 corkscrew weedless hook
The original size Savage Gear Gravity Stick Pintail on a 6/0 Savage Gear Corkscrew weedless hook
Marcin kindly gave me a couple of soft plastics, an EvoBass Lance 150 and a 160. He has had a lot of his bigger bass on the Lance 160 especially when he briefly pauses the lure on a quite specific type of retrieve. I know basically squat about the EvoBass lures but I have a lot of respect for those anglers who design, make and sell their own, interesting bass lures. I have had a bit of a play with these EvoBass Lance 150 and 160 lures and wow do they cast well and then look pretty damn good in the water. In turn it’s got me sort of almost going back to “my” Savage Gear Gravity Stick Pintails in both sizes.
The 6’’ OSP DoLive Stick
I wouldn’t try to compare any of these lures side by side because they are all rather different, but without a doubt the DoLive Stick is an absolutely incredible bass fishing tool that I think stands on its own. We didn’t try to make a DoLive Stick when we did the two Pintails, but of course I was heavily influenced by how well the DoLive casts, and how it responds to different retrieves. Now that I have tried those Evobass Lance lures, if anything I think the Gravity Stick Pintail is almost a perfect cross between the DoLive Stick and the EvoBass Lance - which has got my brain bouncing away again! Because I fish with various paddletails so much I have almost sort of re-familiarised myself with “my” Pintails, and my preferred rigging options are these (whilst bearing in mind that all lures like these should be played around with to discover many more options):
Original Gravity Stick Pintail: the regular (no belly-weight) 6/0 Savage Gear corkscrew hook. Casts really well, but not quite as well as the EvoBass Lance 160 especially. I tend to fish this specific Pintail with either a slowish swim/twitch/brief pause retrieve, or I put a fast few turns in to produce a figure of eight swim. Pause the lure right after this and you might well get nailed!
Newer Gravity Stick Pintail 120 - the little missile. I like either the 4/0 2g or the 6/0 3g belly-weight Savage Gear corkscrew hooks with this size of Pintail, fishing it with a bit of a faster twitch/pause retrieve. We have also done really well dead-drifting this specific size Pintail down a fast run of current in Kerry with our clients, again rigged on the belly-weight hooks.
I now need to go and lie down because my head is hurting with further ideas…………..
The Savage Gear Gravity Stick Pintail 120 on the 4/0 2g Savage Gear belly-weight corkscrew weedless hook
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A chunky Irish bass taken on a dead-drifted Pintail 120