Profile or colour or technique or plain good luck? Help!

We’ve been catching a few fish recently and because it’s the way my brain is wired I like to chop and change when it’s on as such, plus I take a lot of notice of the anglers I might be fishing with and how their catch rates are in relation to the lures and colours and techniques and so on that they are adopting. As long as I live I will never understand how any angler could fish near another angler and not take notice of what they are doing and potentially learn a lot from it………….

Anyway, a few days ago a couple of us were fishing out on the coast in what to me was some deep water for bass fishing, indeed I don’t usually target this kind of water. Two of us were fishing pretty close together and we were both fishing with the Savage Minnow Weedless and the Sandeel V2 Weedless. You know I am working very closely with Savage Gear by now and I will fish with “our” lures when I feel that they can deal with what’s in front of me. The other bloke was fishing with the lures because I know he has been doing really well on them recently which of course makes me rather happy. Cynicism and unpleasantness seems to abound more and more these days, but the thrill I get when other anglers catch fish on lures and rods and so on that I have had a hand in is very real, and very rewarding.

I happened to have a couple of the 12.5cm/28g Savage Minnow Weedless lures with me in some colours which we are sampling and thinking about for the future. The lad I was fishing close to was fishing mainly with the 10cm/16gm Savage Minnow Weedless and the 11.5cm/22g Sandeel V2 Weedless in the White Pearl Silver, Lemon Back and Pink Pearl Silver colours. We were fishing the same bit of ground and over the course of the session I reckon we caught roughly the same numbers of bass. What was really noticeable though was that for some reason I was catching the better stamp of fish. You know me, this is nothing to do with trying to be a social media hero because I happened to catch better fish than another angler over the course of a single session and I have magically become an expert. Nope, it’s all to do with what I find interesting in fishing, and I’d have found it just as interesting if the lad was catching consistently better fish than me that session because I’d be looking at the same things but from a different angle if that makes any sense at all!

So the first and most obvious difference between us was the profile of the lures we were fishing with. I don’t subscribe to bigger lures equalling bigger fish all the time, not with what I have caught and seen caught over the years, but my Savage Minnow was 12.5cm long and had a slightly larger profile than the lures this lad was using. We weren’t catching really big bass by the way - I wish! - but the size differences were noticeable in that particular session. I was watching the lad and how he was fishing the lures, and apart from me perhaps letting my lure sink that bit deeper some of the time, I reckon we were fishing the actual lures pretty much the same.

Or was it a colour thing as well? I wish I could show you the particular sample colour of 12.5cm/28g Savage Minnow I was mainly fishing with because it’s a thing of beauty that is nowhere near the market yet and may never actually end up on the shelves - but it was working really well. Yes I can’t get away from the fact that the bass were on and I might well have caught the same numbers and sizes of fish if I had been using a different lure colour, but our opinions are of course based on what we were fishing with. One session I come away convinced that the colour of the lure makes all the difference, and the next session I reckon it doesn’t make any difference at all. One session and smaller or larger lures seem to work better, and the next session the fish jump on literally anything you clip on and put out there. Or I blank of course!

I was asking some questions on Facebook the other day about lure colours, and it seems that many anglers are in the same boat as me - who really knows? We know what we like in certain situations because it has worked for us before, we are confident in it so we are more likely to fish with it, and we are more inclined to stick with a certain lure colour when the fishing is tough. I tend to like white or lemon back lures in murkier water but I know that a lot of fly fishermen and many lure anglers it seems tend to prefer blacks and browns when the water is like this. I tried it a while back after we had all that rain and I was surprised to catch a few fish on a really quite dark coloured soft plastic I am sampling at the moment. I could go on and on here but I am sure you get my drift. I can’t argue when good anglers say that colour doesn’t matter because we all know it’s the where and when which is the most important thing in saltwater fishing especially, and what can we really prove as regards lure colours and sometimes sizes when what we do is so open to so many different factors? You’re trying to outwit a fish which as far as I know behaves purely on instinct, but damn it’s some interesting stuff trying to figure it all out. You all have a good weekend, please remain as safe and well as you can during these persistently strange times, catch you next week……………

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