Working with Savage Gear aside, the Sandeel Pencil lures have almost crept up on me to the point that I am completely obsessed with them. I love how like the Line-Thru Sandeels they are such simple lures to fish with - they cast a country mile and are designed to be straight-retrieved - yet they are so much more than I initially thought. What we have now is the Sandeel Pencil SW in five brand new colours in the 90mm (13g), 125mm (19g) and 150mm (30g) sizes, and they are all rigged for saltwater fishing now with seriously good and the right size trebles plus a single hook. I have been fishing with these exact lures for a long time now, I can’t get enough of them, they are finally on the market now, and I can’t get into trouble for talking about them!

(If you do follow any of these links to buy some of these new lures - thank you as always - please bear in mind that the full range of sizes and colours will be available over the next few days as they come into stock).

If you go back and read this blog post here about how I find myself fishing with these Sandeel Pencils a lot more than I first envisaged when I thought they would be mainly lures for my surf fishing. Read until the end of the blog post and you will realise that I have in fact got what I was asking for because we now have these Savage Gear Sandeel Pencil SW versions. I was always after some different colours to the regular Sandeel Pencil lures, and I was also after rigging these new SW ones with proper saltwater trebles plus the option of a saltwater single hook as well. I will tell you all about these new treble hooks in another blog post because they are now available as well. I do believe that using these treble hooks for two years or so has given me all the insight I need to know how good they are, but as I said, more info to come.

A part of what I find so interesting about these Sandeel Pencil lures is that if I had come across them say ten years ago I reckon I might have left them alone because they aren’t doing loads of jingling and jangling around in the water when you wind them in. Now though I find myself believing that less is so often more, and in a roundabout way and as I say in the video above, I have come to see these incredible Sandeel Pencil lures as a kind of ultra long range soft plastic with how they swim so shallow and so subtly. You can actually subtly change the action on these lures by deliberately adjusting your retrieve speed, plus in slightly deeper water or over cleaner ground they also work well with some spin-stops (check this blog post here). I also see them as a kind of needlefish I guess, because they have done so well for me at night and I whack them out and wind them in like I would most needlefish lures - check this blog post here. Sandeel imitation, needlefish, swims more like a soft plastic, long range shallow-diver, who really cares if you ask me because I can’t get enough of these things and what they do for me and my bass fishing in so many more locations and situations than I could have ever imagined.

The new treble hooks and the new Treble Hook Protector

And it was only natural that as the original Sandeel Pencil lures began spending more and more time in my lure boxes that I went and asked my Savage Gear people if we could please have some different colours - had to have a white, black and cotton candy for starters - and also if we could please rig them for saltwater fishing. I have a feeling that a lot of anglers who are fishing with the original Sandeel Pencils are getting on just fine with the supplied hooks, but I feel far more comfortable with the saltwater designed hooks we are now using on the Sandeel Pencil SW lures. We are also supplying them with these new Treble Hook Protectors which are pretty handy if you like carrying a few lures in say your front wader pocket and could do without a hookpoint going through the material. As with the treble hooks, you can also get these Treble Hook Protectors separately.

So I’ve been fishing with what you now see as the Sandeel Pencil SW lures for a long time now, and the roughly 8lb bass above that I caught here in Cornwall on Boxing Day at the end of last year came on the Matte White colour Sandeel Pencil SW 150. If you read the blog post about that particular fish you might have picked up on me not exactly talking about the exact colour of the lure I caught the fish on. Apologies for that, but I have to be a bit vague sometimes. I have been wanting to shout from the rooftops about these new colours for ages now, indeed as much as I am finding the work I am doing with Savage Gear to be some of the most interesting and fulfilling stuff I have ever done in fishing, bloody hell it’s hard to not be able to talk about the stuff we are working on until we hit specific dates. It’s these awesome new Sandeel Pencil SW lures and replacement trebles for the time being, but wait a few more months and holy cow have we got some more bass fishing gear ready to hit the market.

The Sandeel Pencil SW 150, cotton candy and a well used Matte White

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The new Savage Gear Sandeel Pencil SW lures - new colours, saltwater rigged, new video up about the lures

© Henry Gilbey 2023