It might be “just a hook”, but this brilliant Eagle Claw Lazer Sharp L12 Weedless hook with moulded keeper is so good for TPE soft plastics especially

You know those soft plastics which you can’t mix with other soft plastics and which are buoyant and last for fish after fish? I am on about the likes of the Z-Man lures, some of the MegaBass stuff, that killer Nikko Craw 3.2inch creature bait, those awesome Savage Gear Ned Dragontail Slugs, and so on. They are all made from some sort of Thermoplastic Elastomers, or TPE for short. Soft plastic to you and me, but a different type of soft plastic to say a Gravity Stick or a DoLive Stick……………

A bass on the Savage Gear Ned Dragontail Slug rigged on one of these awesome Eagle Claw Lazer Sharp L12 Weedless hooks

And when you start fishing with the various TPE soft plastic lures, you might have noticed that you can’t get a corkscrew (which sits on a typical weedless hook) into them, plus you can’t mix them with other lures, they are naturally buoyant etc. Either you say sod this and leave these types of lures alone, or else you recognise the value of them for wrasse fishing especially, plus more and more bass fishing scenarios which I am kinda stumbling upon - so you look for terminal gear which can help you present them the right way. I obviously can’t prove it, but it makes me feel so confident that a creature bait such as the Nikko Craw 3.2inch for example is naturally sitting bolt-upright on the bottom, waving its claws, and saying “come and eat me if you dare” to a hungry bass. And they do often dare to!

As an aside to this specific Eagle Claw hook I want to tell you about, I got out fishing the other day for the first time since getting back home from my guiding work in Ireland. Catching that first bass after guiding other anglers is always such a buzz, and even more of a buzz was the fact that this this beautifully marked bass smashed my Savage Gear Ned Dragontail Slug fished exactly as I would a regular (crab imitation) creature bait. Not bumping the lure in current like I have been recently - they slay like this! - but deliberately working it along the bottom (outside of current) like I would a creature bait. The fish above hit the lure so hard I saw my braid moving through the water almost before I registered that there was a bass on the end!

Anyway, thanks to a friend I came across these awesome Eagle Claw Lazer Sharp L12 Weedless hooks recently, as per the photo above. I don’t know which came first (photo above), the similar Z-Man ZWG Worm Hook - photo below - or this Eagle Claw Lazer Sharp L12 Weedless hook, but you will notice that they both have a sort of moulder keeper not far from the eye of the hook which really helps securely hold these TPE soft plastic lures in place. I have fished with both types of hooks a good bit now, and whilst I really like the Z-Man ZWG Worm Hook (a mate has caught a lot of good bass on them with the creature baits), I do prefer this Eagle Claw version. I think that where the moulded keeper sits on the Eagle Claw hook is a bit more efficient and easier to work with, and the overall shape of the hook holds different soft plastics in place so well. The points on both hooks are really good, but there is just something about the “Lazer Sharp” Eagle Claw version which really does it for me. For the most part I have been using these hooks in size 3/0 because they fit the Nikko Craw 3.2inch and Z-Man Turbo CrawZ 4'' creature baits so well, plus the 10cm Savage Gear Ned Dragontail Slug which I find myself using more and more. I hope it goes without saying that these hooks also work well with your more regular soft plastics, but they are obviously going to rip up more easily when you remove the lure from the hook.

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The 10cm Savage Gear Ned Dragontail Slug rigged on one of these 3/0 Eagle Claw Lazer Sharp L12 Weedless hooks, the arrow is pointing to the moulded keeper which is part of the hook