Tackle-tartery aside, how many different types of hard lures do we actually need? What are they doing for you?

For reasons that will become more apparent in due course, I have really got to thinking about the types of hard lures we might use for our bass fishing. Not the actual lures themselves please note - for I have many! - rather the “families” of hard lures for want of a better word. If you broke down the sort of bass fishing you might do and then went for a close look at the lure box or boxes you might take with you, what are your hard lures actually doing for you? And however many hard lures you take with you, are a lot of them simply variations on each other?

Taking away all the soft plastics and metals and “alternative hard lures” (pencils, vibration, lipless, needlefish etc.), I reckon that most of my hard lures conform to three distinct “families”. For sure it’s a bit of a generalisation and in some respects a look around my collection is mildly worrying with how many variations there are within these three families I have so easily talked myself into buying, but I reckon I could dump the majority of my hard lures into three groups of families - surface, sub-surface shallow divers, and sub-surface medium divers. Or however you want to refer to these three families of lures.

I think I have been lure fishing for bass for long enough now to have half a clue of how most of us go about our shore based stuff, and it continues to interest me how much soft plastics have become so important to so many of us. But I still turn to hard lures of course, and I reckon if you asked a hundred bass anglers how they most like to catch bass the answer would be via surface lures. There may well be a few soft plastics designed for fishing on the top, but for our bass I reckon our surface lures are hard lures.

And how easy do you find it to source the hard lures you really want to fish with? My eternal thanks to all of you kind souls who choose to buy some of your lure fishing gear through my affiliate links, and of course I try my best to keep the links updated and so on - but it’s essentially impossible with how tackle comes in and out of stock. I am only ever going to be honest and therefore I can only talk about gear I either use myself or see used a lot by anglers I know and trust, but bloody hell a lot of these lures I like can be hard to find. IMA lures seem to be getting rarer and rarer here in the UK, I am seriously getting into some of the Shimano Japan lures because they are brilliant but the ones you can find seem to be out of stock in the UK more than they are ever in stock, I can’t find a DUEL lure anywhere - and so on. It’s not for me to speculate upon the many reasons for all this, but it is frustrating, and I’d rather buy my gear in the UK if at all possible.

So I do continue to doff my cap to a company like Ultimate Fishing over in France for making their hugely popular Patchinko range of surface lures so readily available. I do wish these lures were a little bit cheaper because I am not sure the Patchinko’s build quality quite justifies their prices, but the lures are proven bass machines, we don’t lose many surface lures, and I can’t help but come back to how much say twenty peeler crab would cost these days compared to how many bass a single surface lure might catch in its lifetime. I am increasingly drawn to the newer Patchinko 125 over the larger Patchinko, and although I seem to have done less surface fishing this year than normal, when putting a surface lure out as far as possible is in order I find myself clipping on the new and cheaper Seadra LaunceR more and more because without a doubt it gets out there even better than the Patchinko II. Is it as good a surface lure though? I am enjoying finding out, put it that way.

We all have our favourite hard lures which we turn to again and again, but I wonder if you would find your own collection of them for the most part conforming to the three groups or families I mentioned above? If I get my way then I am going to be a part of bringing some really good and useful bass lure fishing gear onto the UK market - more to come on this. For sure there is always a need for innovation because if there is one thing lure fishing for bass has taught me it’s to keep an open mind and keep on learning - surf fishing? - but I’d love it if more of the type of gear I want to use was more readily available……………

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