Is a soft plastic paddletail/shad in its many different forms the most versatile bass fishing lure out there?

Crumbs the mind doesn’t half wander around when it’s already the middle of January and the weather has been doing its winter thing, and via my starting to do some exciting work with Savage Gear my brain is in full on thinking and planning about bass fishing tackle mode. For all the different hard and soft lures we might turn to for our bass fishing, what for you is the most versatile “family” of lures you own and use? When I refer to “family”, I guess I mean type - surface lure, hard sub-surface, paddletail, metals/jigs, straight stick/twitchbait soft plastic, and so on…………

This is all hypothetical by the way, but let’s think about all the sort of terrains you might shore fishing over and through for your own bass fishing, and also think about any plans you might have this coming season for new areas to check out etc. Is a bit of surf fishing on your radar for example? How about taking a closer look at our many estuaries with a bass fishing head on? If you have never gone lure fishing at night for bass, is 2020 the year for you to have a proper go?

And of course you’re probably going to stuff various lure boxes full of any manner of different lures that you hope might catch you a bunch of bass. What though is the one family of lures that could cover it all for you? I’ve found my one lure rod that if needs be can do all the shore fishing for bass that I currently do - this freak of a rod here - but as I might move from estuary to rock mark to shallow reef to surf and so on, what’s the one type of lure which could catch me bass in all these situations?

For me it’s got to be the (soft plastic) paddletail or shad when I think about it in those terms above. I love a shallow diving sub-surface hard lure or surface lure or soft plastic “twitchbait” like a DoLive Stick over a shallow reef as I am sure many of you do - but you can also work certain weedless paddletails on jig heads along the bottom, or rig certain paddletails on weedless hooks and swim them nice and shallow. As I fall for surf fishing more and more I find myself filling my lure boxes with metals and sandeel type “pencils” especially, but paddletails on jig heads can and do catch plenty of bass in the surf at times. Off the rocks into slightly deeper water we might end up using a bunch of different hard and soft lures, with paddletails rigged various ways being perfectly adept here as well. Bumping various lures down a run of current lends itself to paddletails on jig heads and so on and so on. Conversely, would I get very far chucking a DoLive Stick on a weedless hook into a 25mph headwind and a raging dollop of surf? How many lures would I lose by fishing a casting jig or a Hound Glide over a really shallow reef? Would a surface lure do me much good when I’m trying to work a lure along the bottom?

I enjoy thinking back to when I first really came across these types of lures and I’m pretty sure it would have been those weighted Storm shads I’d have chucked out for pollack from the rocks. How many lures did I lose with those exposed J-hooks?! I had absolutely no idea back then how versatile a lure a paddletail could be. Until the Fiiish Black Minnow came along I hadn’t really grasped how you could use different weights of jig heads on similar size lure bodies to cover so much bass fishing for example, and then I came across how you could take some paddletails and rig them either on a belly-weighted or weightless weedless hook and swim them like you might a shallow-diving hard lure. You can of course use a paddletail on a jig head the same way as you might use all manner of hard lures - whack ‘em out and wind ‘em in. Hell, you could probably work some weightless paddletails across the top and catch bass at times if you had to.

So there we go - nothing really gained but that’s where my head is this January morning! I obviously can’t yet go into what I’m working on with Savage Gear, but you don’t need to be a qualified detective to work out at least a bit of what I’m thinking about with regards to bass fishing lures. We’ve got some seriously good gear out there these days, but can some things be done better or differently? I am off to Copenhagen for a couple of days next week for some bass fishing related work, so you all have a good weekend and may your brains not be bouncing quite as much as mine is………….

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