I’ve stopped pre-rigging all my soft plastics, it’s all good so far……

I said I was going to carry on talking about fishing! There was a point during the testing and evaluation period before the Gravity Stick soft plastics came to market when I reckon I probably had say 25+ lures pre-rigged on their 6/0 weedless hooks, plus whatever DoLive Sticks I had rigged up on the Owner Twistlock 5/0 hooks that I have always liked with these lures. Plus a few other odds and sods of course. Now I obviously didn’t need to take all these different soft plastics out fishing with me, but well before the Gravity Sticks went on sale I had been trying plenty of different colours of the three different lures (Pintail, Pulsetail and Paddletail), plus I was then messing around with setting some of them up slightly differently with insert weights and/or rattles, or on the belly-weighted 6/0 hooks and so on. With the various samples turning up here at home from time to time it ends up being a load of potential combinations of colour, hook, rattle and insert weights which I might need to test out……………...

It can add up to a lot of lures pre-rigged on weedless hooks, and even though I always wash my lures in freshwater after use, I haven’t yet come across a weedless hook that’s designed to use a corkscrew/hitchhiker attachment which doesn’t suffer from sort of rust damage over time if you use them with the high salt content soft plastics especially. I know squat about different metal combinations and how they react to saltwater and so on, but I have always assumed that a combination of a metal hook, a (different type of) metal hitchhiker, saltwater, and then high salt content soft plastics is going to result in rust damage. Now I work with Savage Gear so it isn’t exactly a problem for me to get hold of more weedless hooks to use with the Gravity Sticks, but even so I don’t feel particularly good about having so many hooks in circulation which then gives me a headache when I try and decide which ones to actually take out fishing with me. I obviously have my favourite lures like any of you here, but it can get a bit confusing sometimes when I’m trying to mix it all up between fishing and testing which can often be one and the same.

I am lucky in that I tend to get some really good interaction on my Facebook page when I ask fishing related questions especially, and at some point last year I asked a question along the lines of what do you do about rigging soft plastics on weedless hooks for your fishing. A number of anglers kindly replied, and I was quite surprised by how many of them said that they just take some lures along with them and then rig them up when they are actually out fishing. The ease of use of a hitchhiker or corkscrew based weedless hook is that you can then simply unscrew a lure to change colour or actual lure and so on. In 2019 I put this blog post up here about how you can actually use hitchhikers on their own with regular weedless hooks, and as much sense as this makes sense I do prefer weedless hooks which are actually designed to be used with a hitchhiker, as per the photo below.

So I thought I’d give it a go, and I fully expected to be back to pre-rigging a load of different lures before long - but I’m not. I do still pre-rig the soft plastics I take out night fishing with me, mainly because I only take a few together with some Sandeel Pencils and needlefish, but also because I need to wear glasses these days for close up stuff, and it’s a right pain to do so at night. Not for my daytime bass fishing though. Nope, now I take a few of the Savage Gear 6/0 Weedless Corkscrew hooks with me when I go out fishing - with and without belly weights - plus a selection of the rattles and weight inserts which I wasn’t completely drawn to when they were first suggested to me but now I use them a lot (more to come on this). I can’t remember when I last lost a weedless hook but I like to have a couple of spares in my rucksack. It’s considerably easier now to put a bunch of different soft plastics in the long sided washable lure box which sits in my HPA Chest Pack with its short-sided sibling. If I am not fishing with paddletails rigged on jig heads (Black Minnow, SG Sandeel etc.) then I make no apology for the fact that THE soft plastics I take out fishing with me are the Savage Gear Gravity Sticks, but whatever these types of lures might be for you, take it from me that it isn’t nearly as much if a pain as I thought it would be to change lures not by unclipping the hook with the lure actually on it, but by keeping the hook on my Breakaway Mini Link lure clip (still the best!), unscrewing what was on there, and then screwing whatever combination of Gravity Stick profile, colour, weight insert and rattle that I reckon will do the job for me. All I then need to do is wash a weedless hook or two in freshwater when I get home and they are ready to go again, and so far the four Savage Gear 6/0 weedless hooks which I have been taking out and using like this for a few months now (2 x regular, 2 x belly-weighted) look essentially as good as new. How about that for some Monday morning gold?!

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