You can choose one kind of lure to successfully deal with as much of your bass fishing as possible - what would it be?

Please note that this is nothing to do with what’s your favourite way to fish for bass. If I did a poll based around that particular question I would imagine surface fishing would take first place. Nope, here I am interested in you or I thinking about all the different places and types of ground and conditions we might chase bass, and then trying to nail down the one type of lure which could successfully deal with all that variety if you could only take the one lure - or type of lure……………

Which of course makes it rather easier than trying to pick the one specific lure over a type of lure. Yet again I come back to the paddletail or shad design of soft plastic and the many different ways you can rig and fish a lure with a thumping type of paddletail on the end of it. Other types of soft plastic lure designs can be fished in similar ways of course, but I think about some of the bass fishing I have done this week for example, and then I think about how I might fish for bass wherever I might choose to go because of the tides and conditions and time of year - and if I could only carry the one type or “family” of lures it has to be the paddletail to me. I have no idea who first came up with the paddletail design, but I wonder if it originated in the US within their massive freshwater bass fishing scene?

I was talking with a very good bass angler I know this week who has caught a number of big bass from the shore, and I can’t help but take note when he reckons that when the bass are in serious feeding mode they will more likely than not hit most things if presented correctly. In many respects I agree with this, but what this theory doesn’t get to the bottom of is how varied so much of our bass fishing can be, and then how versatile we need to be as anglers to successfully deal with such a wide range of terrain and conditions. Right time, right place, it goes without saying, but surely a lot of the skills we need are also based around getting lures in front of fish. Many anglers may well love fishing surface lures above anything else, and of course I understand this completely, but the sphere of bass fishing goes way beyond where you or I might do most of our fishing. If there is one thing that lure fishing for bass has rammed home to me, it’s the need to keep a very open mind.

Now in many respects it’s a bit of a cheat to be able to choose a paddletail. If you fish with paddletails then I am sure you know all about how many different types of paddletails there are for starters, and then how varied the ways in which we might rig or present or fish these lures are. From surface fishing with a paddletail rigged weedless and weightless - I am determined to catch bass like this - to sending paddletails rigged on heavy jig heads down to the depths in outrageous runs of current from a boat, with almost everything in between. By no means am I saying that I would turn to a paddletail over other lures when faced with every single bass fishing situation I can think of, rather that if I had to choose one type of lure to cover it all - I obviously don’t have to choose in real life but it’s the point of the blog post! - I can’t think of a more versatile type of lure than the paddletail in all those different guises.

I had a really interesting chat with a US angler called Zeno Hromin the other day, one of the lads behind the consistently outstanding Surfcasters’ Journal online magazine and also one of my must listen to podcasts, their Night Shift podcast. We got onto the subject of bucktail lures and how much a striped bass angler like Zeno raves about these simple looking lures which they tend to fish somewhat differently to how the design of the lure might suggest. I bought a couple of bucktails when I was last in the US but I haven’t really tried them for our bass, and when Zeno and I got to talking about their obsession with these lures I then asked why he didn’t turn more to much bigger paddetails when fishing big, shallow boulder fields like we might do for our own bass.

And he said something which really stuck in my head because it’s not really a problem I have come across with our own bass fishing from the shore. When paddletails start getting really big they tend to become more like helicopters to try and cast any meaningful distance, indeed it then got me thinking about what the optimal dimensions and jig head weights and so on might be if covering a lot of water is key. Zeno said that a bucktail fished with a trailer was a very effective way of covering a lot of water with a lure that casts very well and could also offer a large profile - which to me makes a lot of sense albeit we are targeting generally far smaller fish which often seem perfectly happy to hit smaller lures which cast just fine. Yep, you’ve guessed it, a bit of bass I have done this week has really fired up my brain with the questions it has posed of me. You all have a good weekend.