Why does a lure change so often produce a fish?

How often have things gone quiet on you so you change to a different lure and bang, you go and hook a fish on the very next cast? By now you have a pretty good idea how my fishing brain works, so after this exact thing happened to me on Monday morning I can’t help but keep wondering why. Have the fish seen the previous lure move past them a few too many times and it makes them wary? Had the fish moved off a bit and by pure chance when you changed that lure a fish or two had suddenly moved in close again? Did a different lure colour or profile or action etc. provoke the attack? And so on and so on. Surely it’s the fact that we will never quite know the answer to questions like these which is such a big part of this fishing obsession?

So after my Sunday disaster I gave myself a talking to and made what I hoped would be a good decision for a quick few hours out on the coast for Monday morning. I fancied the onshore conditions if I could find clean water and as little weed as possible, so Storm and I jumped into my Epic Berlingo and went for a good look around. I have fished this particular spot a few times before and any bass that any of us caught always came from pretty close in where the sea was dumping hard over what I have to assume is some kind of gutter. In some respects the mark screams certain hard lures which grip really well, but in reality we have caught in the past on soft plastics sitting on jig heads which swim and hold that bit deeper if you adjust your retrieve and rod angle and so on.

Storm and I found some good looking conditions albeit there was a fair bit of broken up weed sitting in distinct patches. I hooked and landed a bass pretty quickly on the 13cm/31g Sandeel V2 Weedless in the killer lemon back colour, but then things went suspiciously quiet when conditions and state of tide suggested a bit more should be happening. I chose that lure because it allowed me to cast in behind the waves, let it hit the bottom, and then try my best to time a slowish straight retrieve with the dumping waves and having to allow for the bits of kelp getting washed around. Short seas don’t produce the most uniform of sea states so I got my timings wrong on many occasions of course, but that one fish and then a quiet period didn’t feel quite right for all that lovely fizzing green water.

So I changed lures, and yes, because I am working with Savage Gear and I got to help think about and design the lures I actually want to go fishing with, I changed over to one of “our” lures. I did have a few exploratory casts with THE hard lure I turn to in bouncy seas - IMA Hound Glide 125F, obviously - but there was a bit too much weed nearer the surface to allow me to fish it properly. Nope, I needed to stick with a soft plastic on a relatively heavy jig head to keep me deeper down and closer to the gutter where it feels like the fish are hunting in between those dumping waves.

Bear in mind then that I caught the one bass and then a long enough quiet period without any fish to get me wondering if that might be it, but lo and behold my change to a lemon back (same colour as before) 12.5cm/28g Savage Minnow Weedless produced a bass on my very first cast with it, and then a few more fish in fairly quick succession. I know from fishing with all these lures a hell of a lot that I really like how different the Sandeel V2 Weedless and Savage Minnow Weedless are (plus the regular J-hook versions as well) from the point of view of fall rates, “bumpability”, actions, effective retrieve speeds and so on, but was it that change of lure and thus lure profile and swimming action that produced a few more bass? Were the bass still feeding in that gutter area but for some reason didn’t really want what the Sandeel V2 Weedless was doing on Monday morning - but they did want what the Savage Minnow Weedless was doing - or was it just pure luck that when I made that lure change I cast it out at the exact time that a few more fish suddenly came within casting range? I will never actually know, but I caught a few fish and had a few more hard hits which more than made up for Sunday’s stupidity on my behalf, Storm and I had a really good walk there and back, and I got to christen a couple of new lure rod samples I have here which need some serious water time. In these mad and somewhat worrying times, well that’s plenty good enough for me………….

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