What is it about lure fishing that seems to be increasingly floating so many angler’s boats?

Fishing is so awesome in so many different ways, and I guess in some respects I have a slightly different outlook on my own fishing because I have been lucky enough to see such a wide variety of fishing all around our glorious planet. I can’t pretend that I currently have much interest in say camping on the side of a lake and sitting there until a carp picks up my bait, but if I think back to my saltwater bait days here in the UK I’d have most likely said the same thing about going lure fishing for bass at some point in time. Any bass I caught back then were by mistake when I was (bait) fishing for something else, but look at me and my fishing now. How many of you are in a similar boat to me here?

I know that social media and forums and so on can only ever be a snapshot of society at large, but if you are active on something like Facebook or Instagram and you have a saltwater slant to your fishing life, surely you have noticed how many people there are here in the UK and Ireland talking about lure fishing for bass and wrasse especially. Okay, so the timings with lockdown restrictions being relaxed recently have most likely got something to do with it, but a part of my work I guess is to try and keep a bit of an eye on what is going in our saltwater fishing world - and without a doubt there are more anglers asking about going lure fishing in saltwater. What do I need, where do I go, when do I go, catch reports, you name it, we might not have a seriously healthy population of bass and of course there have been some worrying reports about wrasse being commercially harvested for use in salmon farms, but it doesn’t take a genius to work out that for various reasons the whole lighter tackle, highly involved way of doing things that is lure fishing seems to be appealing to more and and more people these days.

I wonder if it could partly be down to busier lifestyles and how easy it is to go lure fishing for a few hours compared to having to source and/or manage bait supplies and so on to go bait fishing. It obviously helps if you live relatively near the sea - I accept that completely - but a box or two of lures together with one rod and reel and you’re as good as set to head out lure fishing. No rigs, no lead weights, no bait, no tripod, no rod quiver, you name it, lure fishing to me is the perfect way to so easily go out fishing and make it count. Not for one second do I mean that a particular type of fishing is better than another, indeed that is a pointless argument at the best of times, but I do find it fascinating how much of a kind of newly discovered joy lure fishing seems to be providing for a lot of anglers.

And I wonder then if the reinvigoration that lure fishing seems to be providing for a lot of anglers is a lot to do with how involved it is. I come from a bait fishing background and I have always presumed that I will get back into it in some way in the future, but without a doubt when lure fishing for bass seriously came along for me, I was starting to question whether two rods in a tripod or laid on the rocks while I waited for the fish to come to me was the be all and end all of my own fishing. Lure fishing obviously requires you to be always casting and retrieving and moving and so on - very much like a lot of fly fishing I might add - and I can’t help but think that such an “involved” way of actually fishing is what does it for so many of us in the way that it obviously does.

How about the fact that a lot of the fish we might catch in our waters aren’t exactly very big or scarily powerful when compared to some other parts of the world, but lighter gear like we use for lure fishing allows us to get the most out of a fish like bass. I can think of a few bass on 6oz beachcasters that I caught by mistake and to be perfectly honest I wound them straight in and thought little of it, but if I went out tonight and hit say a 4lb+ bass off my local beach on the sort of lure rod we tend to use? Now that’s a lot of fun, and especially in shallow to shallowish water where we tend to do most of our bass fishing from the shore. On lighter gear I would argue that we’re now talking about a true sporting fish and we tend to and indeed should still have the upper hand but that directness to the hooked fish is just such an invigorating experience. Good beachcasters these days are just as technically amazing these days as an expensive lure rod from Japan or France, but a 4lb+ bass hooked at 100yds out on a rod designed to cast 6oz plus bait simply isn’t much of an out and out sporting experience for me. Fishing is obviously different things to different people, and I also can’t help but wonder if the wonderful world of shiny lure fishing tackle is another part of the increased appeal (what, me?), but is it only me here who is fascinated in why different kinds of fishing do it for different people? I hope you are getting out and about a bit more and loving going fishing however you choose to do it.