Let’s talk about……….soft plastics and how many of us couldn’t imagine going out without them now
Two remarkably simple words which when combined describe so many different types of lures that in some respects it’s doing such versatility a bit of a disservice - and that’s the key to me here. Versatility. Is there anywhere we might find bass which we can’t properly fish these days because of the options that all our different lures give us? Like me have you almost wept when you lost a couple of expensive shallow-diving hard lures because you simply didn’t know that there was another way to target that lovely looking, shallow and gnarly as hell ground which wants to grab onto and not let go of your exposed treble hooks?
I have two very distinct bass fishing memories which are based around how soft plastics have entered my fishing world to such an extent that I couldn’t contemplate going bass fishing without them these days. When I first started getting into bass fishing thanks to a lad who lived in south east Ireland at the time, he would take me to this stunning mark that we knew as The Secret Spot (original eh!). It’s some awesome ground that for the most part is pretty shallow, and there’s a hell of a lot of reef and bladderwrack in close which of course sets up plenty of holes and gullies and so on. At the time we did not have the knowledge of lures which would enable us to cover all this ground, as in we’d whack out a typical shallow-diving hard lure but then have to crank the living daylights of it to wrench it through and then up and over all that bladderwrack in close because you can’t fish lures with exposed trebles through ground like that - but there are bass in there.
Same part of the world, fishing with the same lad who taught me so much about bass fishing. We were fishing an estuary and I remember us talking about how interesting it might be if we could work our lures along the bottom in all that current like we were working our crab baits on ledger rigs at the time. We messed around with those pre-rigged Storm Shads on running ledger rigs, but really we got nowhere, and then one day a local lad turned up and pulled three 5lb+ bass out literally right under our noses on some weird looking lure sitting on some weird looking jig head, and it didn’t look like it was pre-rigged out of a packet. Not only had this lad pulled those fish out of the part of this estuary that we’d been wondering how we might fish it with lures on the bottom, but he also introduced me to an XLayer sitting on a jig head which I reckon was my first true glimpse of bass fishing with soft plastics. Yep, various bells started ringing in my head and I have never looked back since…………..
I can think of numerous bass fishing spots I used to fish over in Ireland especially (because that is where I really started getting into this fishing and with my eternal thanks to a few very kind and generous anglers) where either we literally had to avoid fishing specific bits of the mark because we couldn’t get a hard lure through it without risking multiple £15-£20+ losses, or else we were not fishing what have now turned out to be really good bass fishing spots because we didn’t have the knowledge of how to fish them or what lures would help us do so. It’s a kind of vicious circle at the end of the day - you need the understanding and knowledge of where bass might be which of course takes time and experience, but then you also need to understand how certain types of lures are going to enable you to effectively use your knowledge of fish habitats and movements. Does that make sense?
Fish are obviously simply fish and as far as I am aware they are working purely on instinct, with I guess food and reproduction being the two main things bouncing around their brains. As human beings and anglers we can of course be accused of overthinking the whole fishing thing, but I would argue that enjoying the problem solving side of this awesome sport is a big part of the addiction - accepting of course that as human beings who can’t “think” like fish we will never completely understand how their instincts affect their behaviour. The whole soft plastics thing to me is a solution, or rather solutions to various problems that need to be solved if we are to try and fish lots of different ground which in turn asks of us to be flexible and adaptable.
To make things nice and simple I guess that I see soft plastics in mainly three different ways when it comes to bass fishing, and I also think it helps to compare back to hard lures where possible:
The ability to fish shallow rough ground. I would still choose the IMA Komomo SF-125 over any other shallow-diving hard lure if push came to shove, and my obsession with soft plastics which can do a similar job and then a whole lot more grew from my use of the SF-125 and Tackle House Feed Shallow especially. I would use these hard lures as much as possible but there were still plenty of times when the location or parts of the location called for something different. I would argue that you are never going to go very wrong fishing a paddletail such as the MegaBass Spindle Worm, OSP DoLive Shad or Gravity Stick Paddletail etc. rigged on a weedless hook with or without a belly weight, and then from this I guess I fell into my obsession with DoLive Sticks and how they can be swum and twitched through literally anything. These days I make no apologies for these types of soft plastics being the Savage Gear Gravity Sticks for me, but in reality there are more and more soft plastics available to us which can do similar jobs.
Soft plastics like regular hard lures. Whack a soft plastic like the 120mm Fiiish Black Minnow or 12.5cm Savage Gear Sandeel out, let it sink for a bit, then wind it straight in - surely this is at least similar to fishing a hard lure such as the IMA Hound 125F Glide? There are a whole load of paddletails especially out there that you might rig on some kind of weighted jig head which I would suggest are essentially soft plastic versions of hard lures when you whack ‘em out and wind them in over the sort of ground you’d fish lures like the Hound Glide or Sasuke or DUO Tide Minnows and so on. I continue to find it amazing just how much we can do with various paddletails depending on how we rig them and fish them, indeed after seeing some reports of a few freshwater bass anglers in Europe catching black/largemouth bass on the Gravity Stick Paddletail rigged on its 6/0 weedless hook and fished like a surface lure - they look so interesting when fished like this, rod tip up and worked fairly fast etc. - it’s on my list of have to properly try this year for our (saltwater) bass.
On the bottom. Bumping soft plastics on jig heads down a decent run of current, working something along the bottom over all kinds of clean and rough ground, estuary and open coast, you name it we can do it with soft plastics, and this is one area where hard lures can’t cut it. As I described near the top it’s the way in which soft plastics wormed their way into my bass fishing and then grew from there. The fact that I can tuck the point of the hook into the back of a soft plastic lure and end up losing very few lures even when bumping a paddletail along the bottom over some pretty horrible ground is something I can’t do with hard lures. And so on and so on.
If you had shown me a lure like the 5’’ long Albie Snax say ten years ago I’d have most likely laughed, and I find it fascinating how so many bass anglers - me included - have so much confidence these days in lures which are doing so comparatively little in the water. Surely soft plastics and how effective they are have helped change the perception of confidence in what our lure actions sometimes need to be or indeed don’t need to be to catch bass? There is so much more to go into here but let’s save it for another time. You all have a good weekend, please stay safe and well, anybody else getting horribly over excited about bass fishing this year?
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