It seems like a lifetime ago now, but when I was out doing some co-guiding work in Kerry I guess the summer before last, I had a few sample Sandeel Pencil 125 lures with me which weren’t yet on the market. Because of some of the bass fishing we were getting our clients into, I really fancied these lures working at a few spots during the day and also at night. John has historically done so well on the original Line-Thru Sandeels, so I asked some of the lads to try one of the Sandeel Pencils when I thought the location or conditions warranted a lure like this……………
So whilst I do accept that I am seriously obsessing about the Savage Gear Sandeel Pencil at the moment because there a lot more to it than I originally realised, I also know that if I had come across a simple hard lure like this say five or ten years ago I’d have probably overlooked it and moved onto something else because it wasn’t doing enough “exciting stuff” in the water to my human eyes. I have come around to seeing a lure like this as a sort of hard plastic version of a soft plastic though - all the distance advantages, but with a subtler action more akin to some soft plastics I like fishing with. I really, really like this. But as somebody who also does a bit of guiding work (and which I am missing like crazy because it’s so rewarding and involving), I am not about to try and make our customers fish with a lure they aren’t enjoying using or don’t feel very confident with. I am there to obviously help out and suggest a lure or approach that I think will work, but I am also there to help anglers have a good time and enjoy their holiday in a truly special part of the world that I can’t wait to get back to. So I understand it completely when a client asks me if we can take the Sandeel Pencil off and clip something different on which they can actually feel doing something in the water when they retrieve it. Surely it’s only natural that if you can feel a certain lure doing much more than another one then the fish can as well? The question I am always asking myself though is what do the fish prefer? We haven’t yet sprouted gills the last time I checked.
And so I do understand when an angler loses confidence because they can’t feel a lure doing very much on the end of their line; I was in exactly the same boat for a number of years and I refuse to forget this. I still have to fight the voice in my head which sometimes says “go on Henry, take off that lure which is swimming so subtly and which you think the bass prefer, and clip on something far more exciting which will rattle and roll and flash and jangle, because Me the Voice knows what the fish actually want”. I am no more than an obsessed angler myself who is trying to get better at lure fishing for bass, but as far down this endlessly fascinating road I like to think I have travelled so far, I still see things with human eyes - and a part of me can’t help but feel that if I can feel a lure doing something meaningful in the water then surely the fish can better see or sense it?
It was obviously soft plastics which first got me thinking about how less can so often be much more in bass fishing. I’m not saying less is categorically always more by the way because I don’t profess to be an expert who has been lure fishing since before they were born, rather that over a fair bit of time spent lure fishing for bass now I personally feel that less is better than more overall (remember of course that this could be a reflection of a lot of the sort of marks I might fish). I was and perhaps still am drawn to lovely shiny hard lures which do all manner of exciting stuff in the water on a simple straight retrieve as per my blog post from earlier this week, but these days I do find myself far more excited about lures which are far more subtle. It’s all down to confidence of course, and over a lot of fishing time I have become more and more confident that lures which we don’t think are doing a huge amount are very obviously doing what the bass wants to see or sense to trigger their feeding behaviour. But when things are quiet and I’m (subtly) fishing away there is still the voice that pops up from time to time and wills me to change to something with a lot more jingle and jangle. It probably doesn’t help that I am often trying various samples out these days so I am more inclined to chop and change because when the fishing’s really on I don’t get my kicks by counting bass and doing the social media hero thing. Nope, I would far rather find out if something might work better or worse and try to increase my knowledge and experience like that. I am so drawn to lure fishing for bass because I never had even half a clue that there could be so much interesting stuff to learn, and whilst we can never truly prove what we come to think because we can’t ask the fish if we’re correct, I for one find myself filling my two medium size washable lure boxes with more and more “less is more” hard and soft lures these days. You all have a good weekend, please stay safe and well, how much are we looking forward to a return to normality and the bass fishing properly getting going again?
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