Where does the whole "you need to wind lures really, really slowly at night" come from?

There are many bass anglers out there with heaps more experience of fishing their lures at night than me, but I would argue that there are usually multiple ways to skin the proverbial cat in lure fishing especially, indeed this whole “learning all the time” is what consumes me. I can remember a fair few years ago now when I first took it upon myself to try lure fishing for bass at night and because I had read all about how you needed to wind lures at a glacial kind of pace I did exactly that - and I simply could not feel what the hell was going on at all. I lost contact with my lures, I didn’t catch, I got bored with turning my reel handle once an hour or so, I lost confidence very quickly, and it wasn’t until a few years later that night lure fishing really switched on for me…………..

Not for one second am I trying to say that winding lures very slowly at night doesn’t work well for bass because it very obviously does, and I reckon my mistake when I first properly tried was picking the wrong lures which didn’t really work at such a slow speed. I swim a DoLive Stick at night somewhat slower than I retrieve a white senko for example, and it’s fascinating to keep finding out more and more about the various needlefish I might fish with respond to different retrieves and so on (praise be to the gods of fishing because the lad who makes my favourite and most trusted needlefish lures has got a new website up and running and you can now buy them here, they really are beautifully made, make sure to access the drop down menu from the SHOP tab at the top of the page because there are a lot more of Charles’ lures on there than you might realise, and then read here about how he got into making lures). I don’t tend to fish at night that much with many conventional sub-surface hard lures because I err towards different kinds of lures which I think work better for me, but I have stood next to a client of ours over on a lonely beach in Ireland who nailed bass after bass one night on the long-casting IMA Hound 125F Glide - and believe me, with the adrenaline that was obviously pumping he was cranking the living daylights out of the thing. The bass didn’t have any problems finding the lure at night and in a bit of surf.

A couple of the Charles Nelson Needlefish that I have done really well on, and they cast SO well

I guess what I am trying to say here is that fish like bass seem to be remarkably adept at finding our lures in all kinds of conditions, and the more I night fish for them, the more I am of the belief that a glacially slow retrieve doesn’t have to be THE ONLY WAY. It’s A way, but I would argue that there are MANY different ways which can also work. One angler will say do this, the next angler will be doing something completely different, another angler disagrees because he or she has been an expert for a couple of centuries, and so on. I have already had a few cases this year when changing lure colour from white to black or from black to white seems to have made a difference at night or in that late half-light period before it’s properly dark, and I have also been playing around a bit more with retrieve speeds. Wednesday night was a classic example and it’s churning around my head good and proper………

I can’t regale you with tales of great big bass crawling up my line all night because for a while I hadn’t had a single sniff of a fish. I blogged about my growing obsession with these Savage Gear Sandeel Pencil lures the other day, but where I was fishing with the size of the tide was getting really shallow and I didn’t feel that they were quite the right lures to turn to. I have got some soft plastics here which aren’t a million miles away from hitting the market and I am literally wrecked with excitement about how they fish and how many different options they give me, but the fishing’s been tough around here recently and even one of the samples in particular which is fast becoming a go-to lure for me didn’t get nailed on Wednesday night. Things were not looking very good at all!

Now this particular soft plastic rigged weedless and weightless casts very well for reasons I will explain in due course, but even so it’s a soft plastic rigged on a weedless hook and there’s a lot of water somewhat further out there that I am not able to cover with it. As lovely as Wednesday night was, I was hardly overcome with bass activity and I thought why the hell not, time to change tactics a bit and cover some water a lot further out and see if I can find a fish or two and save the session. It’s getting really quite shallow out in front of me now but I know that if I can thread a long cast out there then I can access a bit of deeper water. I will then need to speed the lure up a fair bit to make sure I don’t snag it up good and proper and lose it in the rocks when I get in closer.

I don’t know how far these Sandeel Pencils do actually go, but after fishing with a soft plastic rigged weedless and weightless which casts pretty damn well it’s still a bit of a shock when I clip on the 19g Sandeel Pencil 125 in the Matt White Tobis colour and larrup it out there good and proper. I am fishing on my own and I know I had a bit of a giggle as the lure flew out there, but as much as I am doing some work with Savage Gear and I get hold of these lures without much trouble these days, I still hate losing lures. Time to concentrate and start fishing the lure with the sort of retrieve speed at which it’s been working for me recently, but as I said above, I then need to crank the speed up to get it over the very shallow ground in front of me. This is a lure though which has its origins in saltwater sea trout fishing and a lot of that fishing is fast retrieves over very shallow ground with the rod tip down. A lure like this Sandeel Pencil (which comes from the Line-Thru Sandeel) will swim just beneath the surface when retrieved like this.

And blow me bloody down if I don’t get slammed good and proper about five yards or so off my rod tip. I had done the “rod tip up with a medium sort of retrieve” over that slightly deeper water further out, and then about where I reckon the ground really shallows up I put my rod tip down and wound my Sandeel Pencil 125 a fair bit faster to get it back in but also keep it fishing just in case - and this is when a bass hit me. Okay, so the fish was only about 3lbs, but with how quiet Wednesday night was I was over the frigging moon with it, and I honestly can’t remember a bass of that size hitting me so hard since surf fishing last year. I think I might have yelped but nobody was around to hear me so I can claim a certain level of maturity that doesn’t actually exist! It was only the one fish but because of how my head works I can’t help but think about how that one bass I caught came when I happened to be winding a lure in at what I would call a fast retrieve. What I would call a “regular retrieve” has worked so many times for me at night, but I reckon that was about the fastest I have been winding a lure in on Wednesday and a bass hits me. When I first really got into lure fishing at night I tended to carry mostly white senkos rigged weedless and weightless because they are what worked so well for me from the off (thanks Steve!), but these days there’s more variety to my night fishing lure box for any number of different reasons. Different lures that via different retrieve speeds fish in slightly different ways at different depths. Damn this lure fishing thing is a blast……………

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