Saw a bass landed (and a better fish lost) on one of these blenny/goby lookalike MegaBass Dark Sleeper lures, interesting looking bit of kit

I am sure that some of you here have watched the French bass fishing video from Ultimate Fishing which is based around this very blenny-looking lure from the Japanese company MegaBass (check further down this blog post). Called the Dark Sleeper, to me it looks like a very realistic imitation of a blenny or goby which I have always assumed that our bass must surely feed on when they are close inshore over reefs especially. I only got to see one of these lures in the flesh recently because my mate Mark took a punt on a couple. It’s a complete lure as such - the weight is internal and the J-hook sits out of the back of the lure and is rather cleverly kinda hidden by the imitation dorsal fin. MegaBass do not do cheap lures and I guess that if and when the soft plastic body of the lure gets badly damaged then it’s lure over and you’d be left with nothing but an internal jig head/hook, but if a lure catches fish for you then surely the cost was worth it?

So I did what I often do and I asked around on Facebook about this lure. Mark landed a small bass on one the other morning over some very snaggy ground, and I will admit to being somewhat sceptical about fishing a non-weedless hook/pretty expensive lure like this over that kind of rough ground - but it worked. Mark also missed a fish on the lure a bit earlier in the tide, and then the next morning he hooked a somewhat better bass at a different location but his line snapped during the scrap. It’s some of the roughest ground you could ever hope to fish, and Mark happened to be working a Dark Sleeper along the bottom and right through some of the worst of it, with sharp points of rocks sticking ominously out of the water even at high water. We presume his tight braid brushed a sharp rock and parted. Whatever the case, the lure works, and I’d be daft not to be interested in how it was working. I also note that I didn’t see Mark lose one of these lures to a snag over some very snaggy ground.

A few anglers who I respect were talking to me about how firstly they were losing less Dark Sleepers than Fiiish Black Minnows (or similar) when working them tight to the bottom over shallow rough ground - which really surprised me - and that the internal-weight design of the lure and how it is obviously designed to swim when fished like these lads are doing so is seemingly helping to keep the lure tracking rather well. Does that make any sense? I can’t pretend to have any more knowledge of the Dark Sleeper other than I have now seen them in the flesh and I saw bass related activity on them over the weekend.

The unanswerable question is always going to be would another lure have worked just as well? Which I get, but there is surely no point to the question because you can firstly never know, and secondly you can only ever catch on the lure you happen to be fishing with it. If a certain lure goes and works when fished in a certain way over a particular type of ground then I would suggest you’re going to feel confident with it when you are next faced with a similar situation - and because you feel confident you might well turn to that particular lure first. For me it would have once been a Black Minnow to work along the bottom like Mark was fishing his little Dark Sleeper, but now it would be the Savage Minnow Weedless or Sandeel V2 Weedless in the different sizes/weights because I obviously got to work on these lures and get various features incorporated which I really wanted to see. Is something like the Dark Sleeper doing something much different to the other lures I have mentioned?

And it obviously gets my brain working overtime again. I am going to have to buy a Dark Sleeper or two and deliberately fish them where I might turn to “my” lures if I wanted to work something along the bottom. I want to see how the Dark Sleeper feels compared to a soft plastic on a jig head with a weedless hook sort of arrangement, and whether something like the Dark Sleeper with its internal weight design and that J-hook sitting out of the back but kinda covered by the dorsal fin does indeed feel like it’s doing something a bit different. Do I need an excuse to buy a few lures in the name of “research”?! A legitimate business expense.

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