If you want to catch bass on creature baits, it helps if you don’t fish like a tit!

Cover myself in glory I certainly did not yesterday afternoon! We are having a blast out here in Kerry - the bass fishing has been a bit tough with some very changeable weather, but we have found a few fish and one of our lads got properly torn up the other morning by a good fish. We were fishing very, very shallow, seriously rough ground, and he hooked a train on the Savage Gear Sandeel Pencil 125. The fish went the way it chose though. Tight braid touched sharp rocks and it was all over. It happened to be the lad’s 60th birthday as well which proves yet again that fishing is not remotely fair………….

Birthday boy didn’t get the big present!

So we did a bit of thinking yesterday afternoon and decided to tuck away up an estuary. The obvious way to fish it was to swing paddletails and DoLive Sticks etc. in the current, but I wanted to concentrate on the creature baits because I wasn’t going to learn a huge amount by using the same sort of lures as the other lads. There was also a bit of colour to the water from some recent rain, so I went with a cheb-rigged Savage Gear 3D Reaction Crayfish 9.1cm 7.5g because it’s got an inbuilt rattle which I thought would help. I put the lure on one of those 4/0 Savage Gear weedless hooks we made for the 120 size Gravity Sticks (my knowledge of these crab imitation lures is not remotely extensive I might add).

I flicked out at what looked like a good vantage point, allowed my lure to hit the bottom, and started trundling it slowly along with the odd pause and tap on the rod tip. Lo and frigging behold if on that first cast I didn’t get a great big “whack” on my rod tip, and like a tit I struck so hard and so fast that even a (ridiculously fast) tigerfish in full on attack mode couldn’t have properly nailed the lure! I couldn’t bloody believe it. I know I should have been dialled in on the first cast, but to be honest I wasn’t expecting it and I messed up.

Literally as I was berating my lack of fishing ability, one of the lads shouted that he was into a bass on one of those rather good looking Keitech Easy Shiner paddletails which he had rigged on a belly-weight weedless hook. Of course he didn’t fish like a tit and he duly landed the bass for a quick couple of photos! Another lad then landed a fish on a 6’’ DoLive Stick which he dead-drifted in a bit of current, and for a while I did change over to a paddletail because I momentarily lost the conviction to continue with the creature baits. By no means do I believe it’s the only way as such, but I am always after more options to give me a better chance in different situations.

I gave myself a good talking to and went back to that Savage Gear 3D Reaction Crayfish 9.1cm 7.5g lure. I upped the cheb weight on the front to 14g because there were some fairly deep sections to where we were fishing and I felt more comfortable trundling the lure along the bottom with some extra weight. One of the lads wandered over from a different part of the estuary and quickly hooked and landed a bass on an interesting lure had bought because he had been watching YouTube videos about some inshore saltwater fishing in the US where the anglers smash fish on them - the Egret Baits Vudu Shrimp. Prawn or shrimp imitations make as much sense to me as creature baits/crab imitations for bass fishing, and the way that Vudu Shrimp comes pre-rigged with the weight at the front gives it the most incredible action when you gently bump and twitch it along the bottom. Yep, guess who woke up at 2.30am this morning thinking about the Z-Man EZ ShrimpZ 3.5inch lures he bought a while ago and how he might rig them up to get them “swimming” like this? It doesn’t get any easier! This lad then hooked but dropped what he reckoned was a much better bass on his Vudu Shrimp.

And then my second chance of the session suddenly appeared. Once again I was literally trundling my crab imitation along the bottom with a few pauses and the odd tap which I was hoping would help get that “come and find me in the murkiness” glass rattle do more of its thing. And once again I got a really hard “whack” on the rod tip. I like to think that this time I gave a tiny pause before setting the hook, but in reality I am not sure if I did - and I think I need to do so. Let the bass properly engulf it, a bit like counting to three before striking when a trout sips a dry fly off the top. Anyway, for a brief couple of seconds the bass was on and my rod tip was doing that glorious thing when you hook a fish almost vertically. Bang, bang, I dread to think how high my heart rate suddenly was - apologies to the kind physiologist who helps us heart attack people out at the gym on a Tuesday evening! - and then a split-second later every bloody thing went slack and the bass was off. The language that poured forth from my dirty mouth was quite frankly embarrassing. So close yet so far and all that crap, but to be honest I fished like a tit and I didn’t deserve to hook and also land my first bass on a crab imitation lure. Today I have woken up a new man though. I have matured overnight and today I shall succeed! All will come crashing down if I hook and lose another bass, I do grant you that, but up until that point I am Henry Gilbey 2.0…………….

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