The more that certain lures can do for me in more fishing situations, the more I gravitate towards them

Let’s take two soft plastic paddletails which are designed to sit on jig heads - the Fiiish Black Minnow and the Savage Gear Sandeel. I would hazard a pretty good guess that both lures have caught a stack of big bass over the years for a lot of anglers, and I personally have more experience with the Black Minnow than the SG Sandeel. I am obviously working with Savage Gear but it doesn’t take a genius to work out that I haven’t been with them long enough to have had anything to do with the SG Sandeel (as much as I would love to, I obviously can’t talk about future plans). I did some really enjoyable and interesting work with Fiiish for a while, but I was never anything to do with product development. I happen to think that the Black Minnow system as a whole is arguably the most influential bass fishing lure design of the last ten years though……………….

At the end of the day it’s a not remotely cheap paddletail sitting on a jig head kind of lure, as indeed is the somewhat cheaper SG Sandeel. You can cheerfully take both lures out, whack them out, wind them in, and catch bass or any number of other species if they are around and feeding. But it’s how much more the Black Minnow can do for me over the SG Sandeel that is a big part of the lure’s appeal to me. Loads of you here know all about how lethal the SG Sandeel with that sleek body and pointy shaped jig head can be when you whack it out and wind it in, but would you take this paddletail body sitting on this (pointy) shape of J-hook jig head and bump it along the bottom over a savage bit of reef or let it works its way down a fast run of estuary current? The (non weedless, damn I would love to talk to you about certain stuff but I am not allowed to) SG Sandeel is obviously not designed to be fished like this which is why it doesn’t permanently live in one of the two lure boxes I carry in my HPA Chest Pack - I take the SG Sandeel out fishing with me when I think where I am going might call for this kind of lure.

But the (weedless) Black Minnow with the Shore style jig heads especially lends itself to being a lure which tends to live on one of my two lure boxes all the time because of how much it can do for me in so many different situations. Swim it like a hard lure, bump it along any kind of bottom, work it in current, and so on. At heart it may just be a paddletail sitting on a jig head, but when you fish with it for a long time and really dial down into how much this lure can do for so many anglers, bloody hell it’s a clever design. I also can’t ignore that a soft plastic like this informs some of my future based thinking.

And then I look at the various hard lures which I might take out fishing with me and without a doubt I am finding myself using them less these days. I accept that this may have a certain amount to do with me doing my stuff with Savage Gear and often having stuff to test out, but it’s also to do with how a shallow diver is just that - a shallow diver. It sits in my lure box and I can’t really add or take away from it to get it to do much more for me in different bass fishing situations. Don’t get me wrong, conventional surface and sub-surface hard lures are a vital part of my bass fishing, but I can carry a bunch of arguably more versatile hard lures and soft plastics rigged various ways which can do more for me over a wide variety of fishing situations - and with a bit of thinking about more rigging options I am finding them ever more useful. I nearly got through a blog post without talking about these new Gravity Stick soft plastics which I am so proud of, but I was chatting to my main contact at Savage Gear the other day about various things, and he asked me whether I had thought about a specific way of rigging soft plastics like the Gravity Sticks - and whether we could improve upon it. Holy frigging cow did the old lightbulb go off in my head when he showed me something over video, and a few days later said items arrived here in Cornwall for a bit of a play.

So yes, I have been thinking a lot about how I might take lures like the Gravity Stick or DoLive Stick and incorporate them into my fishing even more because I obviously have a lot of confidence in them to catch me bass. We obviously brought the Gravity Stick range to market as soft plastics to be rigged on our two weedless hooks and then fished mainly as you might fish lures like this - but I want to do more with them and soft plastics like them. I don’t know if you picked up on me fishing some slightly cut-down Gravity Sticks on J-hook jig heads the other day and catching a few bass like this, but as well as it worked it’s not really offering me any different options to how I might fish with the Black Minnow or SG Sandeel in the same sort of location and sea conditions. I do like messing around with stuff though.

These “things” that arrived the other day are fascinating in their simplicity, because as much as some of these specialist rigging options for soft plastics that come from say the freshwater bass fishing worlds in Japan and the US are so clever, one thing I can’t stand doing when I am out (saltwater) bass fishing at night or during the day when it’s pissing down with rain and blowing hard is to be fiddling around with a bunch of fiddly extra components. I want more options if I can get them, but in a perfect world I want to have those options with minimal fuss. Hell, I don’t even know whether what I am playing around with and/or what this playing around does for further ideas will ever see the light of day, but it doesn’t half ram home to me that there is so much more we can do with so much of the gear we already have - and I like this. I hooked a small bass the other day on my very first cast using these sample items I was sent, and what was really interesting to me was how I more sea out on the coast than was forecast - but I had another whole range of options in my lure box because of these very simple but rather ingenious new items. The more I can get less lures to do more stuff for me the better in my book……………..

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