This morning I got one of those bass-eats right off the end of my rod tip. I very nearly wet myself……..

I blogged the other day about how much of a thrill it is to get feedback from a few anglers who got hold of some of these new SG Gravity Stick soft plastics before they came onto the market, but now that these lures are now properly on sale I am starting to see reports from an increasing number of anglers who have kindly bought some of these lures and are catching fish on them. It’s obviously a huge thrill from my point of view that these new Gravity Sticks didn’t even exist even as samples up until a year or so ago, and now they are in the shops and on websites and they are catching bass. If I was a cynical old expert who had been fishing with soft plastics for bass before soft plastic fishing lures were invented then perhaps the thrill would have passed, but damn it’s some buzz to see all this going on. I am an utterly obsessed angler myself though, and even after all my work on the different generations of these new lures, it’s still the most amazing jolt of electricity when a bass goes and smashes one of “my” lures. When it’s literally right off the end of my rod tip as per about 7am this morning then you will understand I am sure why I damn near wet myself with excitement……………….

Where Mark and I went out fishing at 5am this morning is one of those local spots where I have visualised a fair few times now some perfect conditions and a few bass eating these Gravity Sticks because the place can sometimes lend itself to being fished like this. We tend to fish it either when you’ve got some proper surf conditions or else I like to try and time it for first light when you’ve got a bit of bounce on that can be fished in a bunch of different ways - smaller waves rolling in, fizzed up water, a pushing tide, but not enough sea to kinda force me to fish with Seekers and the bigger Sandeel Pencil 150 and so on. We had an hour or so of fishing in the dark this morning and I had a few gentle taps on the Gravity Stick Pulsetail which felt a bit like garfish nudging the lure but not being able to take it, not entirely sure though, but nothing was landed until we were well into the half-light period of a particularly grey September morning.

If I had caught no more fish than the first one this morning which did one of those classic tap, tap, bang kind of hits on my white Gravity Stick Pintail I’d have been more than happy. I had rigged the lure on one of our 6/0 weedless hooks (no belly weight) and I don’t know if it made any difference, but I had put a rattle into the rattle-slot which sits behind where the hook goes in, as per the photo above. There wasn’t enough sea on this morning to call it classic surf conditions, but there were enough wavelets rolling in to make it look tasty as hell. The bass fishing around here this year has been very up and down, and if we hadn’t seen at least a fish this morning I’d have been a little worried when everything looked so good.

So I could easily have carried on fishing with my white Pintail this morning, but the lure did its job and I wanted to try swimming a Pulsetail rigged on a 6/0 weedless hook with belly weight through some of the fizzed up white water, as per the photo above. I felt a gentle tap on the lure almost straight away which at least proved to me that I hadn’t done anything wrong by changing lures, and then on about my fifth cast I happened to spot my Pulsetail swimming through a little wave right in front of me and about a metre and a half or so off my rod tip. I was thinking how nice my lure was looking in the water and I was just about to lift it up and out of the breaking wavelet when the Pulsetail very suddenly disappeared and my rod tip slammed over. What turned out to be a rather green and angry 3lb+ bass wasn’t happy at all, so it decided to swim around me a few times because it obviously didn’t need any braid, but because the fish had hit me on such a short line I actually had to flip the bale arm over and pay a bit of braid out under tension to prevent any high-sticking of the rod and be able to bring the fish to hand for unhooking. I love how with bass in the surf on barbless weedless hooks you can simply get a finger under the bend of the hook and lift it out of the fish and watch it swim off without ever having to handle it.

We are obviously not talking about a monster bass from this morning, but to spot my lure swimming in the water right off the end of my rop tip and think mmmm, that looks nice, and for the lure to then be engulfed right in front of me? It’s another fishing memory that will live with me for a long time. Some anglers obsess about big fish only and put on this stupid pretense of not even enjoying “lesser” bass, but what’s the point of that? I caught another fish this morning on the Pulsetail before I had to make myself come back home to do some work, but it was that eat off the end of the rod tip that I am still smiling about. BBB - Bass Before Breakfast, and to be able to nip out fishing so easily around where I live never loses its thrill.

I reviewed the rather special HTO N70 Labrax Special N7094ML 9’4’’ 7-42g lure rod earlier this week, and this morning was a fishing session where such a versatile rod like this really does it for me. I could just as effectively fish my Gravity Sticks as I could absolutely blast a 35g Surf Seeker out there - which I did - and the rod is 100% as effective whatever you throw at it. I know that such a light rod as this loved a nice small spinning reel like this awesome Shimano Stradic 2500HG-FL, but with the surf based wading I knew we’d be doing, plus the amount of water shipping over me this morning, I was never going to go out this morning without my Penn Slammer III 3500 strapped to this wand of a lure rod. As I said in my review, I do think this HTO N70 Labrax Special N7094ML 9’4’’ 7-42g lure rod feels just as nice with a heavier reel on it, indeed my mate Mark was fishing with the slightly longer 9’9’’ 8-44g HTO N70 Labrax Special lure rod this morning, and he had a Slammer 3500 on it as well. I can’t get the outfit back off him now!

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