Sub-surface hard lures - whack and crank or do a bit of twitchy stuff?

I am realistic enough to know that as much as I find so much enjoyment and motivation from my work with Savage Gear, and now increasingly some of the other brands within the massive Pure Fishing operation, this work can also impact on my own fishing in certain ways. I choose to let this happen because it’s not as if one of the grownups says Henry you have to chop and change between various current and sample lures to learn more about them - but I genuinely enjoy the whole learning and discovery processes. I have never been one of those hero anglers who counts fish or measures everything they happen to catch, but I obviously very much enjoy simply catching fish. But I also really enjoy playing around with fishing tackle in real fishing situations…………

So I was sent some sample hard lures recently. It’s a project which I have managed to have a bit of input into and it’s getting close to final designs - but I am fishing and testing them in a different way to which they are intended. The designer has designed them as more of a jerkbait style of hard lure - cast them out and then animate them. Twitch, pause, twitch, rip, reel, pause etc. It reminds me very much of how the Ultimate Fishing people I used to know a bit would fish many of the hard lures they import, whereas we would come along and simply whack them out and crank them in.

My feedback on these sample lures then is based upon how I tend to fish the sort of sub-surface hard lures which so many of us turn to on a regular basis. For sure I will “animate” some of the soft plastics I might fish with, and surface lures we know all about of course, but when it comes to your more regular sub-surface lures I have never made any apology for the fact that I tend to whack and crank - bang said lure out, wind it in, and allow for what the lure is meant to do via its design. Shallow, deeper, ultra-shallow, rolling, wobbling etc., I have always tended to straight-retrieve these lures and let them do their thing. I might play around with retrieve speeds and high or low rod anglers and so on, but at the end of the day I am trusting whatever the lure does on a straight-swim to attract a hungry bass.

And I’ve got these sample hard lures here which I happen to think look incredible in the water when you wind them straight in, with the rod tip up especially which really exaggerates the action - but I know the designer designed them more for the European market where a lot of (sea) bass anglers tend to do something “twitchy” to their hard lures. You know how much it interests me how different anglers all fish subtly differently for the same species of fish, and without a doubt there are regional and national trends as such. Those Ultimate Fishing lads were so surprised that us English anglers weren’t animating our sub-surface hard lures when we started retrieving, and in turn we were surprised to see how much they were doing to their hard lures on the retrieve.

What do you do? Do you sort of feel like perhaps you should be twitching some of the hard lures around but they look so nice when you just wind them in? Do you base your likes and dislikes of certain lures on what you are doing which might not be how the lure was originally intended to be fished? At the end of the day I don’t think it matters at all if something works for you and if it can problem-solve a certain bass fishing situation. I am going to continue working with these particular sample hard lures how I tend to fish with sub-surface hard lures, and I will then keep feeding back my thoughts and ideas as I go along. Surely the more use we can get out of individual items of fishing tackle the better?