Sorry if I sound a bit like a public service broadcaster, but all the new Savage Gear lures we have been working on are now here (rods here next week)

I reckon the first time I clipped on the first sample of what is now the Savage Minnow and caught a bass on it was July 2019 when the world was what we now refer to as normal. I still have that exact lure as well. In early 2020 everything may well have changed, but we have been working on these new lures since early 2019 and now here we are, nearly two years later, and they are in shops and on websites and like with the Gravity Sticks I first worked on with Mads, I couldn’t be prouder…………..

On my bass fishing “progression cycle” as such I was fairly late to the party with the Savage Gear Sandeel, and like many of you I also came around to wanting a weedless version of it. I know you used to be able to get those weedless jig heads, but top of my list of things to suggest and work on with Savage Gear was a proper weedless version of their much loved Savage Gear Sandeel. We soon started on the next generation which is now the J-hook Savage Gear Sandeel V2, and we also have a really good, purpose-designed weedless version in the Savage Gear Sandeel V2 Weedless. This weedless one has a different shape of jig head which mirrors our jig head design from the Savage Minnow, and it’s to allow for a really strong, rolling kind of swimming action as well as the chance to bump it along the bottom and/or swim it close to snags and have the best possible chance of not snagging it up.

There are also spare Sandeel V2 lure bodies for both versions, plus jig heads and hooks which can all be bought separately. I want to do everything at once but I have to accept that from a business point of view it’s not always possible to do so - we have gone for weights of jig heads which we believe offer a good range of uses right now, with plenty of plans for the future. I remain rather proud of the fact that the 13cm/33g Sandeel V2 Weedless and 14cm/33g Sandeel V2 (J-hook) sizes - they are the 11cm spare bodies if that helps - are a new size of Savage Gear Sandeel which didn’t exist before I came along and started working with the company. I have obviously gone through fishing with various generations of samples of all these lures, so it was a particular thrill early on Monday morning to open an actual brand new packet, take out a Lemon Back 11.5cm/22g Sandeel V2 Weedless, crush the barb - and catch bass on it.

Then we come to the Savage Gear Savage Minnow, and this is what I have written about these lures on one of my Fishing Tackle pages: Our take on the paddletail/J-Hook jig head and paddletail/jig head/weedless hook combination (who hasn’t been influenced by the Fiiish Black Minnow “concept”?) A lot of thought and testing and fishing has gone into the J-hook Savage Minnow and the Savage Minnow Weedless lures. The simplicity of the Pro Peg Mount system, the way the weedless hooks “click” so securely into place on the Weedless version, the design of the jig heads which combines a strong swimming action with outstanding “bumpability” along the bottom, rattles included and inserted into the lure bodies (easily removable by the way), tough lure bodies but loads of irresistible paddletail action, these Savage Minnows are everything we wanted to make.

I am not going to shy away from how much the whole Black Minnow concept has influenced me. The Fiiish Black Minnow is a killer lure and I will never take anything away from these fantastic French anglers who so cleverly took the whole paddletail lure body, jig head and weedless hook components and made a complete system or concept which has quite possibly accounted for more big bass over the lure’s lifetime than anything else. Paddletails and jig heads and weedless hooks existed many years before Fiiish got in on the game, but I credit them with thinking deeply about it all and coming up with the Black Minnow “system”. The indisputable fact is that this has caused a lot of other fishing tackle companies to want their own paddletail, jig head and weedless hook based soft lures, and as much as I credit the awesome Fiiish for how they do things, I would hope that the road we have gone down with our Savage Minnow - there are weedless and j-hook versions - is different enough to justify the amount of time and work we have put into this project.

As with the Sandeel V2 we also do spare lure bodies and jig heads and weedless hooks for the Savage Minnow. I have had to approach these projects with how I tend to mostly go about my bass fishing and then accept that we are not yet making jig heads heavy enough for a lot of boat anglers’ needs especially. We simply can’t cater for every angler with the launch of so many new products. Not yet as I said, but give us time. We are in this for the long haul and we have lots of plans and ideas and stuff we are working on right now.

I am hoping that a bunch of new colours in the Gravity Stick soft plastics don’t get lost in the mix because I am so pleased with them and I also pushed pretty hard to add them to the range. I am loving my work with Savage Gear but I am only an obsessed angler and I am of course very disposable in this fishing tackle business. We have done all the work required with the actual shape and dimensions of the three different lures in the Gravity Stick range as it is right now (hint, we never stop thinking and working on new ideas), but we did play around a fair bit with the new colours until we were happy. Above is the first bass I caught on what was the finished version of the Lemon Back Gravity Stick Paddletail (rigged on the 6/0 belly-weight weedless hook, back in the UK very soon), and then the fish in the video below was the first one I caught on the finished version of the Cotton Candy Gravity Stick Pulsetail (rigged on the regular 6/0 weedless hook). I love all the new colours and I hope they work as well for anglers as the current Gravity Stick colours are. And on that front, below is what I posted on Facebook yesterday:

I will never be a fishing expert and I have always been entirely comfortable with the fact that there are a lot of far better anglers out there than me. I have worked in fishing for many years now, I have done a lot of different things in this line of work, and I love most of it with a passion. But for all my photography and filming and travel and so on, it's actually the two more recent strings to my working bow that are doing it for me like you would not believe:

1. My co-guiding work over in Ireland with John Quinlan. Working with John and helping anglers catch fish and learn more about fishing should be classed as a drug it's so addictive. I so want to get back out to Ireland and continue with this work.

2. Getting to hear and read about and see other anglers catching fish on fishing tackle which I have helped bring to market via my work with Savage Gear and Mads Grosell especially. With all these new lures we have been working on hitting the market right about now it's the most amazing thrill to start seeing reports and getting messages from anglers who are out there catching fish on this gear. I choose not to do cynicism in fishing, I just love it when other anglers are out there catching fish, and especially on the gear I so passionately believe in.

You are entirely free to take or leave what I write on here and I would expect nothing less of you kind people. The reserved British part of me doesn’t really that comfortable with talking about all this fishing tackle I am so involved with and then affiliate linking to it as well, the cynical British part of me thinks come on Henry you’re just marketing stuff, but the positive part of me - by miles the largest percentage of me I might add - passionately believes in what we are doing and I know that if you read my blog then you are more than capable of making up your own minds and using whatever fishing tackle works the best for you. I am no different to you in that I fish with the fishing tackle that I like the most, and to be honest I’m in uncharted territory here and it’s a buzz like you would not believe - getting to help make fishing tackle that I honestly want to fish with because it works for me. Thank you for reading and please do tell me how you get on with these new lures if you end up using any of them. Roll on the new rods which should be in the shops next week………...

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