More than a year down the line with these lures and the grownups at Savage Gear HQ have given me the green light to tell you all about them. The plan had always been to launch these new lures somewhat earlier this year, but it most likely has not escaped your attention that the world is not the same as it was and a lot of timings got messed up as a result. My first meeting with Savage Gear’s Mads Grosell over in Denmark last year was mainly about my ideas for a range of soft plastics that we could rig on weedless hooks and fish through virtually anything. I came to Mads with a bunch of ideas and because the guy has a lure designing brain like you would not believe (it’s almost scary how fast he “gets” stuff) and Savage Gear are able to produce working samples so quickly, it wasn’t that long at all until I had the first sample fruits of our collaboration in my hands. Okay, so we have tested and refined and changed and adapted to get to where we are now, but this brand new range of Savage Gear Gravity Stick soft plastic lures are not very far away from those ideas we put into a melting pot at our first meeting.

The Savage Gear Gravity Stick Pintail (top), Pulsetail (middle), Paddletail (bottom) - White colour

I have got loads to tell you about these new lures and I will do so over time, but I cannot tell you how exciting and rewarding it has been to be so heavily involved with a project like this. From ideas to samples to testing to modifying to (very nearly) on the shelves, this is the first time I have worked on a project like this, and it’s some buzz. There are loads of far better anglers than me out there, but I have always trusted my ability to think and analyse fishing and the gear we use and need and want. I would never try to ignore how important a soft plastic like the DoLive Stick has become to me over the last few years, but as good as this lure is, getting hold of them here in the UK is often a problem, and I have always had ideas about the basic concept of how a DoLive and other similar lures fish for bass could perhaps be changed and improved upon. I have also always felt that packets of soft plastics on their own are all well and good, but what about the exact hooks and rattles and weight inserts to go with these lures? How many times have I been asked about what are the “correct” hooks to use with the DoLive Stick for example? The lures were obviously the primary consideration from day one, but I was always after a simple kind of “system” as well. Finding feeding fish is always going to be the most important aspect to going fishing, so why not make stuff like the lures themselves nice and easy to rig and fish with? Soft plastics are a vital part of bass fishing, and along with Savage Gear I want to try and help make them as easy to use and understand as a hard lure. It kinda helps as well that these new Gravity Sticks catch bass as well………….

The Savage Gear Gravity Stick Pintail - Wakasagi colour

I headed over to meet Mads in Denmark last year with two specific types of soft plastic lures in my head that would revolve around weedless hooks and with or without a belly weight. Number one was a “twitchbait” style soft plastic that would sit on a weedless hook around the 6/0 size, it had to have a slot for a rattle, I wanted to the lure to be doing something very subtle on a slowish straight retrieve and then be nice and stable but with a degree of aggression on more of a “twitch, twitch, pause, twitch” kind of retrieve, and top of the list was that this lure had to cast really well for a soft plastic. I have a box of soft plastics I have bought over the years from the US especially that look lovely in the packet but then cast like a banana, and this really annoys me when from the shore especially we are often dealing with a bit of breeze and turbulence. I didn’t go to Denmark to try and make another DoLive Stick, but obviously that lure has been forefront in my mind for years now and I make no bones about the fact that a lot of my initial thinking was based around whether we could make a lure do something similar but with more to it. Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you the Gravity Stick Pintail………………..

Photo courtesy John Quinlan, bass caught yesterday evening over in Kerry which is currently fishing its socks off, on a Gravity Stick Pintail, and Ireland doesn’t want us!

Savage Gear Gravity Stick Paddletail, rigged one of our #6/0 Weedless hooks with a belly weight - Green Silver UV colour

Number two in my head had to be a paddletail which could be rigged on the same hook as the Pintail above. I was after a family of lures from the start, with the different lures being roughly the same length and sharing a distinctive look or shape. Many of you I am sure are in the same boat as me here, as in you have fished with any number of different paddletails rigged on weedless hooks, often with a belly weight, and of course there are any number of these kinds of lures out there. Mads and I took the ideas for the Pintail and then translated that slimline but fairly heavy shape, and this became the Gravity Stick Paddletail. If and when you get these lures in your hands you will notice the subtle differences between the body shapes of the three different lures, but at the same time I wanted them all to share a similar DNA, and I might add, give us plenty of options for different variations in the future. What felt like easily the biggest bass I have hooked so far this year came on one of these Gravity Stick Paddletail lures, rigged on one of our #6/0 Weedless hooks with a belly weight (these Paddletails also swim very nicely without a belly weight), but the sodding fish came off and I was left open-mouthed at how strongly that particular bass didn’t want to move!

A bass I caught on the Savage Gear Gravity Stick Paddletail, rigged weedless/weightless on one of our #6/0 Weedless hooks

The Savage Gear Gravity Stick Pulsetail, rigged on one of our #6/0 Weedless hooks

The third lure is in some respects the most interesting lure in the new range, in that I went over to Denmark with two types of lures in my head - as per above - but very early in the initial discussions Mads said that we simply had to have a Pulsetail in the range. “A what?” was my first question, and when he started sketching what a “pulse tail” would look like on the rear of one of these Gravity Sticks, I am going to be completely honest here and admit to being a bit nonplussed because I was so bloody excited about the ideas we had already put into the melting pot for the Pintail and the Paddletail. Holy cow am I glad that Mads went ahead and got samples of all three lures made though, because this Pulsetail is an absolute peach of a soft plastic, it’s so damn easy to fish with, it casts like a missile, it’s very versatile, I have never seen a soft plastic for bass fishing swim like this, and it keeps on catching bass. My mate John Quinlan over in Ireland had a 73cm bass on one the other night, and my mate Mark here rang me up nearly in tears a couple of days ago to tell me that an absolute donkey of a bass had done him in a mass of bladderwrack - hooked on a Gravity Stick Pulsetail.

The first bass I caught on the final, finished version of the Gravity Stick Pulsetail, rigged weedless/weightless on one of our #6/0 Weedless hooks. I think I yelped! Hell, I know I yelped!

I am being told that by 1st October all these different Gravity Stick lures and #6/0 weedless hooks and rattles and weight inserts and lure kits will be in the shops and on various websites. As per the photo above, the Gravity Stick lure kit is a bit of a cracker. It consists of 10 x Gravity Stick Pintail (14cm 15g), 10 x Gravity Stick Pulsetail (14cm 15g), 10 x Gravity Stick Paddletail (14cm 15g), 2 of each model in 5 colors, 3 x #6/0 weedless corkscrew hooks, 2 x #6/0 weedless corkscrew hooks with 3g belly weight, 7 x glass rattles size medium,5 x 1.8g tungsten spikes, all in a lure box. The four colours we are doing for the time being are White, Wakasagi, Khaki, and Green Silver UV, with a special Black Pearl colour available in the lure kit only.

There is obviously loads more for me to tell you about - how we have been fishing these new lures, the ground and conditions we have been fishing them, some of the fish that have been caught on them so far, the details we have put into each lure to allow for rattles and weight inserts and easy rigging and extra “snag avoidance”, prices, and so on. It’s like a big weight has been lifted from my shoulders being able to share these new lures with you though, and whilst I obviously hope they sell well so that I can continue to do this bass fishing related work with the Savage Gear grownups, what I am most looking forward to is these lures starting to get out there and then me hearing and learning about how different anglers are fishing them for bass and hopefully a whole load of other fish. I was messing around with the Pintail a while back for example, and I rigged it up in a way that we had never really envisaged when we came up with the design. Fished in a certain way the Pintail suddenly took on another life which I am starting to explore and think about. It’s a buzz like you would not believe to be involved in bass fishing like this. Plenty more to come, and when these lures hit the shops and websites I will let you know straight away…………..

Savage Gear Gravity Stick, the new range of soft plastics I have been working on, in the shops very soon

© Henry Gilbey 2023