The whole sampling process with fishing tackle is fascinating

Up until I started working with Savage Gear a few years ago, on the bass fishing side of things I had never really been involved in the actual development of fishing tackle. It’s been something I have wanted to do for ages, and many moons ago I got to do a bit on some bait fishing stuff, but a few years into this thing many of us here know as a lure fishing addiction and I wanted to see what I could do………….

Which might in turn sound like I have some higher form of mighty wisdom when I quite obviously don’t. I fish with and spend time around much better anglers than me, and I like to think that this is one of my strengths in the work I do - knowing where I am in my fishing and being able to recognise, understand, and very importantly, be genuinely interested in what other anglers are doing. Some anglers like to talk to and share information with me, and some don’t. We are all very different people at the end of the day, and over the last few years I have really come to enjoy the whole process of taking an idea or ideas and then seeing them through to products which are actually on the shelves or will be in the future.

And by sampling I mean literally me receiving different generations of product samples and fishing with them. My first point of contact with Savage Gear was a lad called Mads Grosell who is pretty much unique in what he can do based around such a wide variety of fish and lure fishing techniques, and then as my work has progressed with the company I now have other people I deal with for other items of fishing tackle. The actual sampling process has become a bit slower since I first started working with Mads due to various factors such as Brexit and the global pandemic, but in essence I communicate my thoughts and ideas with the people I need to talk to within Savage Gear, they do the various CAD drawings if my ideas are worth taking forward, and then the samples are made mostly in China and shipped over to us for testing. Depending on what we are doing these samples could be 3D printed hard lures which I can cast but not catch fish on because they aren’t strong enough, or for the most part they are actual working samples which I take out fishing in the real world to work out where we are and what might or might not need changing. You can do all the talking and planning and drawing and thinking in the world, but nothing is ever going to beat taking fishing tackle out fishing.

Take these new, smaller Gravity Stick soft plastics which are coming out in June for example. I started off by literally cutting various bits off and subtly reshaping the original Gravity Stick lures here at home, but a lot more work was obviously needed, and through a lot of talking and planning with Mads, we went through a few generations of subtly different samples until we got to the point where I could say that I was 100% happy with both the lures and the hooks we have done for them. I keep all the various samples because it interests me to see how we have got to where we end up, and I was insistent from the start with these smaller Gravity Sticks that we had to keep the long-casting abilities of the original ones. This in turn led to a few issues we had to overcome because you can’t simply take away bits of a lure without affecting another part. I won’t bore you with exactly what we did, but have a very close look at both sizes of Gravity Sticks side by side when you can, and see if you can notice what we have been working on.

And then there is that unbelievable buzz at either catching a bass on a new sample lure, or finding out that a certain product is doing what you wanted it to do and it’s making my overall fishing experience that little bit more effective. My mate Mark lost what he reckons is the biggest bass he has ever seen or hooked on one of the samples of the smaller Gravity Stick lures last year, and whilst I’d have obviously loved for him to have landed the fish, it was more proof that we were on the right path. The best bass I have landed so far this year - check this blog post here and see if you can spot my guarded reference to these smaller size Gravity Sticks here - came on one of these new lures which I have obviously been fishing with for a while now, and it couldn’t make me happier or more proud.

The sampling process is very much the time to iron out the ideas which aren’t going to work. A while ago I asked if we could make a sample of a product which isn’t exactly going to change the world, but it’s the sort of thing I use every single time I go lure fishing and I thought that with some work and effort we could improve upon what I was already using, which in turn was a product based upon another product and so on. It’s not until you start the sampling process and take the actual samples out fishing that you can work out what is really right or wrong though. Drawing and talking is all good of course, but we use fishing tackle when we are fishing. I had some ideas for the second generation of samples for this product, and whilst I wasn’t completely sure it was the right way to go, I knew that by going out fishing I could finally find out if my ideas were worth moving forward with. It was an itch I wanted to scratch, and because Savage Gear is so good at the sampling process I knew I could try running with these ideas to see if they improved upon what was already a very good first sample.

And they didn’t! I took the product out fishing and within about ten minutes I knew that I had made a mistake with my ideas for this second generation sample. It’s a modification which I had to explore, and when the product comes to market I can guarantee that some anglers will ask why we didn’t use what I had suggested we try. Thinking about it is very different to fishing with it though. What I thought about made a lot of sense on paper, but when you are out in the real world and actually fishing, I knew within ten minutes that it was a monumental pain in the backside. What I thought could be a bit easier actually turned out to be really annoying, and whilst we could have come up with a massively complicated way to get around these annoyances, more often than not simpler is so much better. I then needed to fully test and ultimately break something on the third generation sample to fully trust how close we were to being right on the first sample of this product.

And so on and so on. I love this whole product development process more than I had a pretty good feeling I would, and it’s so exciting to receive a parcel with first or second or third etc. generations of samples. I have got more gear here than some tackle shops I would imagine, but it’s gear that gets fished with and analysed. I’m not going to go fishing with gear I don’t like, but on the other hand I work in fishing so I am often testing stuff out. There are various items of fishing tackle which Savage Gear either don’t do or don’t do well enough (yet) for me to want to incorporate them into my real fishing world as such, but from when I started working with them to where we are right now, I am using far more of their gear because I have managed to either have a direct hand in helping to make stuff I want to fish with, or I have stumbled upon something in their numerous catalogues and it’s either good as it is, or I have gone back to the grownups and asked if we can make various modifications. The ideas and sampling and development process never really stops, and it’s some of the most interesting work I have done in fishing…………..