I remember when I was getting into lure fishing and how I would lose a fair few lures and get really frustrated

I was looking through a few photos on my main hard drive the other day, and I reckon that apart from a few slightly random experiences of lure fishing for bass, it was the end of November 2004 when thanks to a lad called Graham Hill who was living in SE Ireland at the time, the whole bass fishing thing really started making a lot of sense to me. No more were bass these fish that sometimes came along and stole a bait intended for ray or cod. Nope, now I was actively seeking out places to go and try this lure fishing thing out around where I was living in Plymouth plus spending as much time as I could over in Ireland………..

And I would lose a fair few hard lures and I found it really frustrating. Not to the point where I considered walking away from lure fishing because the whole light tackle approach was really sinking its claws into me, rather that I just didn’t know very much at all about the different depths at which different hard lures would swim and not keep snagging me up over shallow, reefy ground, and I thought for a long time that I was doing something fundamentally wrong. When I first started fishing a lot with Graham over in Ireland he was miles and miles ahead of me as regards finding and catching bass, but neither of us had a clue about any of the soft plastics which we could have rigged weedless and weightless and so on. Hell, I didn’t know what a weedless hook was until I met Nick Roberts over in Ireland and he was using these weird Slug-Go things which he was rigging on these even stranger looking Texposer hooks that I photographed for a Sea Angler article and for a fair while would reference back to my own photos to remind me how you would rig a soft plastic on them. I often think back to a specific spot which Graham used to take me to in south east Ireland, because whilst we caught some really good bass from it, there were great big parts of the location we just couldn’t target. The simple fact is that we didn’t know enough about how to successfully target some of the ground, and to this day I wonder what we might have caught there if we could have done so.

How many of you here used to obsess about that lethal holo-silver coloured Maria Chase BW hard lure that in retrospect I now know cast a bit like a dog and swam that bit too deep for some of the ground I was starting to fish - but damn that lure caught a lot of bass for a lot of anglers! I just didn’t know enough to know that firstly there were other lures out there which I should have turned to for certain kinds of ground instead of losing plenty of the Maria Chase lures to snags, secondly that soft plastics were an option, and thirdly that I could in fact turn to surface lures in conditions that weren’t flat calm.

But it’s a great big learning process is it not? If you’re reading this blog then I am going to assume that you are at least a bit like me in that you enjoy learning about fishing, and in turn this leads to the odd lightbulb moment in your fishing learning curve. It wasn’t until summer 2009 that the IMA Komomo SF-125 came onto my radar and I began to realise that there was a whole family of hard lures out there which were in fact designed to fish the sort of shallow broken ground over which I found myself fishing more and more. I can still remember the first bass I ever caught on this lure, mainly because not long after I returned the fish I had another one almost beach itself on a rock at my feet it was so eager to hit the cotton candy Komomo SF-125. The year before I was around an angler over in Ireland who smashed a load of bass on the Feed Shallow, but for whatever reason I hadn’t really twigged that here was a very shallow-swimming hard lure which was rather different to say the Maria Chase BW.

I have a very strong memory of talking to my friend Cian over in Ireland who used to own the Tramore based Absolute Fishing tackle shop, and I reckon it was around spring time in 2011 when he started talking about these simple looking called soft plastics called “senkos” which they were starting to rig weedless and weightless and fish them over all kinds of foul ground and drifting in current and so on. I remember heading over for a trip that summer and because the lures made so much sense to me I vowed to myself that I would not take the white senko (Waveworm) off my lure clip until I caught a bass on it. You know as well as I do how important confidence is in lure fishing, and my first bass on a senko went 5lbs+ and nearly pulled the rod out of my hand it hit me so hard as I was doing my best to fish the lure with a semblance of subtlety.

And then by next summer I had come across the DoLive Stick and rigging soft plastics weedless and weightless had become an obsession. Some years prior my eyes were opened up to bumping soft plastics like the XLayer down a run of current in an estuary environment, but now I had these simple soft plastics in my lure box that looked incredibly realistic in the water, and I definitely went through one whole year without losing a single weedless hook. For sure I’d replace them from time to time when they started really rusting up, but here I was fishing a lot of very shallow broken ground - and I was able to cover virtually all the ground and not keep losing £20 lures and rage at myself with frustration.

I would imagine that there are many other lure anglers out there who are like me and haven’t been lure fishing since before they were born and letting most of the so-called civilised know about their expertise. I would imagine that these regular lure anglers like me have either gone through some very similar experiences to the ones I have talked about here, or else they are going through them right now. It’s why I pride myself on clinging to how confusing the whole thing can be when you start getting into it all. I don’t ever want to be one of those anglers who has forgotten all about what it’s like when you don’t know enough and how frustrating it can be when you hang a £20 lure up for the second time that session and your leader knot goes ping when you pull for a break and then the bloody lure floats away with a great big grin on its face. The obvious elephant in the room is the biggest subject of all in saltwater fishing though - the where and when………..

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