So pleased to catch my first bass on a creature bait which wasn’t the (rather amazing) MegaBass Sleeper Craw
As I said in the title above, I have fully come around to the fact that the MegaBass Sleeper Craw is a rather amazing bass fishing lure, but then I’d expect nothing less from a fishing tackle company such as MegaBass. It’s what is called an RTF lure - Ready To Fish - in that you can literally take the soft plastic out of its packaging, secure it to your line, and fish with it. The hook or jig head, weight and lure body are all integrated so you don’t need to think about different components and how they might or might not work together properly. I am not complaining about the price of the Sleeper Craw when the one single lure can potentially last a good while and catch a lot of bass, but they are not cheap, and I am finding that they are often out of stock here in the UK. To be fair I have only snagged and lost one Sleeper Craw so far, but that means I have two here in my lure box until I find some more in stock somewhere.
I am calling these types of lures “creature baits” because that’s the generally accepted term in the freshwater lure world where they come from. I know I can’t know exactly how a bass might see a creature bait when it’s sitting “claws up” on the bottom, but in my mind these things are imitating a crab. Start down the rabbit hole of creature baits and there are so many of these lures around, together with any number of different ways to rig them. I do like an RTF lure like the Sleeper Craw, but it’s been playing on my mind for a good while that I really need to catch a bass on a creature bait that isn’t the MegaBass Sleeper Craw - for no other reason than to scratch an itch and convince myself that other crab imitations are going to work for my bass fishing.
And as ever it’s a confidence thing. I am basically a creature bait newcomer with a few bass under my belt now, but up until yesterday evening the fish I have caught on these types of lures have come on the Sleeper Craw. I don’t come from a freshwater lure fishing background so I am so new to all this type of stuff, but I have been playing around with a few different ways to rig a typical creature bait, and at this point in time I have settled on a very simple setup - which I needed to catch a bass on to prove to myself that it works (it does!). You might say of course it’s going to, but the unavoidable fact is that you need to catch a fish yourself to fully believe that it’s then worth investing more time in different ways to do something.
I had no intention of fishing yesterday evening until a mate got hold of me and kindly asked me to come along to a location he has been tempting me with for a while. When he sent me a Google Maps location I will admit that the film Deliverance crossed my mind, but he was indeed there to meet me, and I am still in one piece as I am typing this far too early on Friday morning (serious bouncing brain syndrome going on, when does this fishing thing get any easier?!). I followed him down what I suppose passed for a path, to be met with a lot of what looked like mullet moving around in some good looking water. I tend to think that in a lot of estuaries, if you’re seeing mullet there is a very good chance there are also some bass mooching around.
At some point during the evening I snagged my Sleeper Craw and just managed to wrench it out. Because I don’t entirely trust the hooks in these lures I checked the hookpoint and found that it was ever so slightly turned over due to whatever I had pulled out of on the bottom. I could have carried on fishing with the lure, but how could I forgive myself if I had then hooked a bass and the lure didn’t stick? I didn’t have the right hook sharpener with me - rookie error! - so I took the decision that now was the time to front up and change over to a creature bait setup that I have played around with but not actually fished with when there were bass around. Which there were, because we were seeing a few.
As I said, I have begun to mess around with various creature baits and ways to rig them, and for the time being I have settled on the Westin Swimming Jig Head with either the (cheaper and slightly larger) lead head, or the (more expensive and slightly smaller) tungsten head. There are various reasons for me gravitating towards this specific jig head at this point in time, but if I go into tales of my playing around with different stuff we will be here all day. Let’s save those thoughts for another time. Suffice to say that a creature bait rigged on one of these jig heads bumps really well along the bottom.
So I tied on a 3/0 10g Westin Swimming Tungsten jig head (deliberately not clipped on, definitely picking up less weed without a lure clip to the lure when bumping along the bottom), and onto that I rigged a Z-Man creature bait, exactly as per the photo above which was the exact setup I caught my bass on yesterday evening. I am drawn to the Z-Man creature baits because they float, and this means that on the right type of jig head they sit upright like the Sleeper Craw - claws waving at a hungry bass! I don’t yet know if it makes a difference with this type of bass fishing, but I had inserted a rattle into my Z-Man creature bait via the ingenious Z-Man Rattle-Snaker tool I had ignored as a gimmick until a mate convinced me to buy one (thank you!, it’s also a really handy tool for putting rattles properly into lures such as the DoLive Stick and so on).
We ended up targeting some very shallow water where we could just about see some mullet and bass mooching around. My mate hooked a bass but it didn’t stick, and a bit later I suddenly saw a bass charge in on my creature bait and smash it. I dropped the rod tip ever so slightly to remove any tension from the braid, I felt the hit, then I struck hard. In such shallow water and at such close quarters the bass couldn’t go anywhere, but at about 3lbs it was my first “creature bait” bass on a creature bait other than the MegaBass Sleeper Craw. I also christened a brand new rod I am trying for this stuff, one of the new Savage Gear SG8 Revenge rods from the freshwater world. Nothing to do with me I might add, but so interesting, so different to what I would normally gravitate towards. And very interesting for this bottom contact style of bass fishing.
Anyway, talk about bouncing! If I got three hours sleep last night I’d be surprised with how much my brain has been turning over all the stuff I have been learning recently. Damn right I love my open coast bass fishing, but with these persistently bright conditions and flat calm conditions, it’s over to the estuary based stuff for me until I get what I want on the coast. And I love how different it can be to chase this one incredible species of fish. You all have a good weekend, sorry if this blog post has come across as a bit jittery, but I have been drinking coffee since 3am and I can’t stop thinking about fishing…………
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