Most of the lures I carry with me work really well on a simple straight-retrieve, and I really like this

I was having an online video call with somebody the other day, and in between him showing me some quite disgraceful looking samples and concepts and so on, we got onto the subject of different (sea) bass fishing markets and how anglers in different countries I think err towards fishing their lures a bit differently. I use the words sea bass quite deliberately here by the way, because whenever certain parts of Europe or the US comes into my thinking or fishing related discussions, the fact is that they have freshwater bass as well. There are many things which have really jumped out at me during my lure fishing journey, and one of them was spending some time with some very good French anglers who were rather surprised to see us fishing away and not “animating” our hard lures as they were. Nobody was doing anything wrong because all anglers caught fish, but that was one of those times when I started to become aware of how subtly different the various approaches could be towards chasing the same species of fish…………….

Topwater lures obviously come to life when you animate or work them, so if we take surface lures out of the equation here then how many lures might you clip on and then do much more than wind them straight in because they are working pretty well just like that? I look at the various (and numerous) sub-surface hard lures I own and I think about the different actions they give off and the different depths at which they swim, and that is what I want from them when I cast them out and wind them straight in. I may well vary my retrieve speeds and so on, but I don’t feel any lesser of an angler by telling you that I whack out the IMA Hound 125F Glide and do nothing more to it than turn my reel handle at whatever speed I think is best. I don’t twitch it and I rarely pause it. Same with something like the IMA Komomo SF-125. I clip on a lure like that because of what I know it can do for me over shallow ground especially, but again I do no more than whack it out and wind it in. It seems to work just fine, and I really like this because it’s so easy to do.

Obviously you need to work or perhaps control your lures when you are say bumping a paddletail rigged on a jig head along the bottom - the Fiiish Black Minnow comes to mind of course - and if you have been reading this blog of mine for any length of time then you will know how much I have been obsessed with the OSP DoLive Stick for a fair while now. Even so the DoLive works just fine on a slowish straight-retrieve although I tend to fish it with a twitch-twitch-pause-twitch-twitch-pause sort of retrieve. I sometimes do a bit of a sink and draw sort of retrieve with something like the Savage Gear Sandeel, but even then I would argue that it’s a kind of straight-retrieve anyway.

So rightly or wrongly this all influences my thinking behind the stuff I am doing with Savage Gear. Way before I ever started working with them I emailed a guy I know when I first saw their Line-Thru Sandeel to ask if we could please have a fixed hook version, and whilst I am not about to claim that the Sandeel Pencil was in any way my doing because I know that other people thought the same as me, that whack it out and wind it in way of fishing it really floats my boat. In a month or so I will have more to tell you about the Sandeel Pencils by the way, but as a type of lure it fits right in with how easy to understand and do I like my fishing to be - really easy to fish with lures, but there is so much more to them than I had initially thought. When we sat down to plan what has become the Gravity Stick range of soft plastics I obviously pushed for a paddletail version because I was so keen to have at least one lure in there which we could cast out and wind it straight in and it was fishing properly by doing this. The Pulsetail came about from that first meeting, and aside from playing around with various jig heads and so on, again we are talking about a lure which works really well by fishing it so simply. The Pintail was designed to be the more “twitchbait” style lure in the range, but even then this thing works just fine on a slow straight retrieve, or as per the video above, with a bit of a rip and pause. I never wanted to get involved with any of this “you need to fish so and so lure exactly like this” kind of thing, because firstly why is what I might do any better than what you might do fishing wise, and secondly that I don’t ever want to put any anglers off who are starting to discover this addiction that we know as lure fishing for bass. Trying to find out when and where we might catch bass is the whole crux of what we do, so my attitude is why not put as much brain power into that and make the how to fish your lures bit as easy as possible.

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