If a lot of fishing is confidence, then trusting completely in your terminal tackle when a fish of a lifetime comes along is pretty handy

I can take a good old blank as well as any other angler can, but on Monday night everything out on the coast was so good in terms of tide state, tide size, sea conditions, clarity and moon that to be perfectly honest I was flummoxed we didn’t catch. So as you do Mark and I got to yapping about even more fishing stuff on the way home, once we had dissected our blank and blamed nature/nets/fish/bad luck rather than our own failings. Obviously. We’re blokes. When’s it ever our fault?

I have worked for and with a number of different tackle companies over the years, and most of the jobs I have done or do right now entail me needing to get access to various items of fishing tackle. If I was the tackle company I would do my best to keep tabs on what goes out to who, and over the years I have heard a few stories of anglers in a similar position selling the odd bit of gear on. I choose not to do this for a number of reasons, chief among them being that I don’t believe it’s at all ethical to be given something for free only to sell it on for profit. What I have done a lot of over the years though is give stuff away to people who I think could benefit for whatever reason, but I always check with the relevant tackle company that it’s okay to do this. I don’t want a tackle company to accuse me of doing something wrong when the time comes to get rid of me!

So let’s be honest here. Giving away a couple of spools of braid and fluorocarbon leader ain’t going to change the life of another angler or affect the profit margins of a bigger tackle company, but if I can help a friend out I will. On the way back from our blank on Monday night, Mark and I got to talking about braids and leaders and so on - we lead exciting lives! - and when it got around to what Mark is fishing with and indeed has just loaded onto his brand new Penn Slammer IV 2500 spinning reel (soppy tart!), he reminded me that much earlier in the year I had given him a couple of spools of the dark green 0.15mm/20lb Savage Gear HD8 Silencer 8-strand braid together with a spool or two of 0.33mm/15lb Savage Gear Soft Fluorocarbon. I obviously gave him some Savage Gear stuff because I am working with them and I can get my hands on items like these for nothing.

Please understand here that although I gave Mark these spools of line, he is a grown man and can choose to use the stuff or not. A bloke like Mark goes fishing in his time off work and obviously wants to give himself the best possible chance of landing any bass he might hook. He doesn’t earn a living from working in fishing and if he didn’t like those spools of line he simply wouldn’t use them. What on earth would be the point? I’m the bloke who is working with Savage Gear and perhaps should be more inclined towards fishing with these lines myself, but as much as I have fished with that particular HD8 Silencer 8-strand braid and I think it’s a good braid, on a long-term basis I find it really hard not to fish with the awesome Sufix 131. It’s THE best braid I know of - and of course that’s a confidence thing.

Through photographing Mark when we are out fishing I have been aware that he has in fact been fishing with the dark green coloured Savage Gear HD8 Silencer 8-strand braid, loaded onto one of the previous generation Shimano Stradic 3000 reels before he got a Slammer 2500 the other day. What I didn’t realise was that Mark landed both his double figure bass from the shore this year on the 0.15mm/20lb Savage Gear HD8 Silencer 8-strand braid connected to the 0.33mm/15lb Savage Gear Soft Fluorocarbon leader via an FG knot. Both 10lb+ bass came on soft plastics (Sandeel V2 Weedless and the rather good looking Sunslicker Swimish paddletail), I was around to photograph one but annoyingly not the other, and whilst I blogged about his estuary double figure the other day, Mark’s other double this year came from the open coast over some of the gnarliest, roughest ground you could ever hope to fish for bass.

So I would suggest that he has complete confidence in his setup to have successfully landed those fish. Two bass of a lifetime landed on the same braid and what to me is a pretty thin fluorocarbon leader to be using over such rough ground (which of course gets me thinking about that subject all over again). I tend not to have the one go-to setup because I am so often testing and playing with different gear these days, but I do trust that Sufix 131 above all others, I do play around with different diameter leaders from different companies (my go-to this year has been either the amazing Seaguar Ace Hard or the rather nice Savage Gear Semi-Soft in 0.39mm especially), and I massively trust my knots as well. If any half-decent bass goes the wrong way over very rough ground especially then I would suggest that any braid or leader can break when rubbed against something sharp, but knowing that you have landed two double figure bass from tough spots on the same braid and leader? That would be just about all the confidence I needed, and the fact that Mark landed both fish on the SGS8 9’2’’ 9-42g lure rod is the icing on the cake for me for obvious reasons. Plain bad luck is always going to be a part of fishing, but knowing that you’ve already landed some serious bass on your mainline and leader setup so you can do it again without worrying at all about that part of the equation? That to me is confidence, and confidence to me is key.

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