A while back I blogged about these rather sublime little lure clips that to me are essentially a loop knot in your leader but easier to use because you haven’t got to keep retying knots when you want to change lures. I am really like these Owner Hyper Welded Quick Snap in the size 1 for the lighter side of my lure fishing, accepting of course that it’s more a case of me playing around with things and I am nowhere near knowing whether a clip this light might actually produce a few more fish for me yet…………
But holy cow was it rammed home to me early the other morning that keeping things nice and simple is such a fundamental crux of fishing - it wasn’t yet light and I wanted to change lures. I go to pick a new lure out of my lure box and now I try using this little snap-style Owner lure clip in the dark and it’s a frigging pain in the backside to put it mildly! I can open it up just fine because these are some beautifully made clips that you can’t quite believe can be so strong for such a thin and light design, but now I need to get that slightly hooked bit of the Owner clip into the eye of my weedless hook.
I don’t think Mark heard me swearing at myself through the inky blackness, but I was seriously berating firstly my inabloodybility to properly work the lure clip in the dark and with no light, and secondly that when I did put turn the brighter red light on my rather awesome new Nitecore NU25 headlamp (damn I am starting love this little thing, it’s just an amazing bit of kit), as good as that brighter red light is for moving around on the rocks in the dark, it makes sod all difference when I’m trying to thread the a sodding lure clip that I am not yet properly familiar with through the eye of a 5/0 weedless hook.
Why you might ask? Because I’m 45 years old and for a few years now I have been wearing glasses for close up work - computers, reading, tying knots, that sort of thing. I can see just fine for everything else out long, but that’s sod all use when I’m trying to be all ninja on a slippery rock while a fair bit of swell is rolling in and wanting to change a lure but my glasses are back on dry land in my waterproof rucksack as I don’t usually need them because for a few years now I have been using a lure clip that I know so well and is so brilliantly simple and perfect that I can easily change lures by feel alone.
So at 45 years old and with 38 years of fishing in me I learnt another simple but valuable lesson - when something works so completely perfectly as the brilliant Breakaway Mini Link lure clip does for me, don’t go changing things up at night when you are doing your absolute best to keep dark and quiet and uncomplicated. So as much as I like those rather lovely little Owner Hyper Welded Quick Snaps and especially for when I am working soft plastics around, I won’t be using them again at night! I am all for trying different stuff in fishing, but on the flipside of that urge we should all have to learn and improve all the time, that incident reminded me of the need to keep some things as simple as possible. Swearing through the darkness is not remotely cool or grownup!
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