Is it the dead or dying baitfish thing that triggers a fish like bass to hit lures on the drop?

It obviously goes without saying that a lot of other metal lures cast a country mile and catch bass, but my work with Savage Gear aside, I particularly like the Seeker because of how it is designed to keep on fishing when you stop it. In shallow water these spin-stop type retrieves are not going to contain very long “stops” with a metal lure because of the lack of depth, but they do work, and then in deeper water like I had the other morning, I let the lure stop/sink that bit longer. For sure these metal lures we might turn to work just fine on a straight retrieve, but as with the numerous jigs we can find these days, it fascinates me how often it is that a bass hits a lure when it’s on the drop, or in plain English - when it’s sinking. The one bass I hooked out long the other morning came when I stopped my 28g Seeker and held it on a tight line so that it really flashes and twists as it sinks - bang, fish on, isn’t fishing bloody great?

I wonder how much bass fishing with lures revolves around cranking various diving hard lures in, and perhaps how many more anglers these days are also fishing with hard and soft lures that can often benefit from being worked and not just cranked. I bet you we all carry at least a few lures which can work well on the drop, and because of the way my brain is wired I can’t help but analyse what I think is happening and then create an analogy in my head to those big budget BBC nature documentaries where tuna and sailfish are hoovering up the dead and dying baitfish which are falling through the water column on their way to the sea bed. I think about a lure like the Fiiish Crazy Sandeel which is so bloody lethal for pollack that it’s sometimes almost not fair, and I think about fishing it from shore or boat with a fastish kind of rip to almost “set” the lure - because it’s then when you stop this rip and the lure drops that you tend to get hit, indeed I can’t think of a single pollack or indeed bass that I have seen or caught on the Crazy Sandeel that hasn’t come when the lure drops back down on this kind of rip and sink retrieve. Now a lure like this isn’t exactly making a slow fall to the bottom like the dead and dying baitfish are in those documentaries, but can one assume that a faster moving lure on the drop is potentially still switching on the “eat it now because it’s easier than chasing faster moving, healthy prey” instinct in predatory fish?

And I can’t help but come back to that simple video I put up the other day, because surely it’s various soft plastics rigged without the extra weight of jig heads that give us some of the longest fishing time on the drop during a retrieve? Rightly or wrongly I have always tended to fish the 6’’ long OSP DoLive Stick on a “reel a bit, twitch, twitch, pause, twitch, twitch, reel a bit, repeat” kind of retrieve, and it’s uncanny how many times you get hit on the pause bit, or at least when you go to twitch or reel the lure again. I am sure that there are other soft plastics out there which might respond to the sort of retrieve in the video above, but because I am working with Savage Gear and absolutely loving getting so involved in bringing new lures to bass anglers, I am obviously fishing a lot with these new Gravity Stick lures now. We originally designed the Pintail as what one might call a “twitchbait”, but way down the line with testing and playing with the lure I stumbled upon the fact that even without a jig head or a belly weight on the weedless hook I could still get it to do this S-Curve thing by winding it at the right speed (let it sink a bit after you cast it out). Confidence is obviously key with lure fishing especially, and luckily for me it was only a few goes into this kind of “spin-stop with a soft plastic” kind of retrieve when a bass nailed the lure when I had just put the stop part into my spin-stop retrieve. Dead or dying baitfish? You all have a good weekend and I hope that these huge tides do the business for you on the fishing front whatever you might be chasing……………

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