One of the things about the world of fishing which has always drawn me in is the simple fact that the majority of anglers are good people. For sure there are some idiots out there who are obviously lacking something in their own lives and enjoy putting other people down, but for the most part this is very minor and fishing fits us all in pretty easily. There are so many good people in fishing, and through the course of what I do I get to hear a lot of stuff, indeed one of the mistakes that the haters always make is never realising just how small the fishing world actually is. Do you know that Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon thing in the film world? It’s pretty similar in the fishing world I can assure you, and since we brought these Savage Gear Gravity Sticks to market last year I have been receiving and indeed seeing some interesting catch reports on these lures…………..
Nobody has to get in touch and tell me what they have or have not been catching on these lures I might add, rather some kind anglers have kindly been keeping me updated, plus I get to hear a lot on the grapevine and I see stuff online etc. It’s obviously a huge buzz from my point of view to know that some soft plastic lures which didn’t exist a while back and in which I have been 100% involved are catching some of these fish which we obsess so much about. I accept that it can never be the same as actually making lures yourself and seeing anglers catch on them like Charles here with his awesome Charles Nelson needlefish lures (damn they are good), but it’s still a thrill and I’m going to keep on enjoying the simple thrills in life.
So a bloke who I have been seeing various catch reports from online kindly got in touch with me the other day. I love that he has really got into these Gravity Sticks and that he’s been doing well on them, but he told me a really interesting story along the lines of he saw another angler out and about the other day, and this angler got to asking him about the Gravity Stick soft plastic which was on his rod. This bloke who got in touch with me kindly took the time to explain to this angler what the lures were and how he went about fishing and them and so on, and it’s always big respect from me to anglers who take the time to do this because just a little bit of time and info can really help somebody out. Surely how we treat other people is how we would like to be treated ourselves? That’s how I was brought up anyway, and it is how I expect our two girls to behave.
And then this bloke who got in touch with me ran into the angler he saw and explained some stuff to again the other day, and this angler had only gone and caught a 13lb 7oz bass on the white colour Gravity Stick Pulsetail at night. I have seen the photo of this fish and it’s a donkey, but I have been asked not to put the photo up here for various reasons, and there is also no need for me to even go into the area where this particular bass was caught. It’s true though, and that 13lb 7oz horse of a bass is the biggest bass I know of which has been caught from the shore on one of these Savage Gear Gravity Stick soft plastics so far. Yes there will always be the argument that you can obviously only catch on the lure you are actually fishing with, but so the hell what?. A bass of several lifetimes has been caught on a lure that I helped to make. I haven’t been bass fishing since before I was born and because I don’t tell you how things should be I can’t ever be an expert, but surely the fact that I am not a lifelong bass angler proves that there will always be so many different ways to do things in fishing. Don’t let anybody tell you otherwise.
So if knowing about this bass is a serious buzz from my point of view, the actual Gravity Stick model on which this lad caught his donkey is a bit like the icing on the cake for me. I have such a vivid memory of sitting in Mads Grosell’s kitchen over in Denmark when we first met and started putting our heads together about some bass fishing tackle, and I cling to that moment when I had put forward my ideas and drawings and so on and Mads said “cool, but let’s add a Puseltail to the range”. “A what?” was my next question, because Mads had already done some early sketches of what are now the Pintail and the Paddletail. I was happy. If we could make these lures so that they cast well and took rattles and swum how I envisaged them swimming then that was what I had jumped on a plane to achieve (remember planes anybody?), so what was this Pulsetail thing that Mads was on about?
And this is exactly why bass fishing has taught me never to say never over the years. It’s so easy to close yourself off to new experiences and locations and methods and what have you, and I guess that if I’d really objected to this pulsing tail idea then we might have gone no further. But I was sitting there with a bloke called Mads Grosell who knows more about lure fishing than I will ever know, and whilst he specialises in freshwater fishing I have never come across anybody in the trade who “gets” stuff so quickly. If Mads suggests that we at least get some Pulsetail samples made up to go with what would be the first Pintail and Paddletail samples then why the hell not? Now those first samples were not quite right for various reasons and we ended up going through a few generations to get to the final product, but I do remember swimming one of the Pulsetails for the first time and thinking holy bloody cow this looks interesting - a lure body which is very much like how a senko swims in that the body is doing basically nothing on a straight retrieve, but look at that pulse tail pulsing subtly away all the time. It’s very different to how the whole body of the Paddletail moves in the water because of the paddle tail, and from that first sample I started getting really excited about the Pulsetail. I like all the lures for different reasons and I caught my biggest bass on the Paddletail last year - but I do believe there is something very unique about how the Pulsetail swims, and of the three Gravity Sticks I think I might be obsessed with the Pulsetail the most. The fact that the biggest bass I have heard of so far came on a Pulsetail and in white and at night serves to connect so many dots in my lure addled brain. A big thanks to the kind angler who told me about this fish and how it came about, and of course it’s a serious well done to the angler who caught a bass like this. Anybody else getting highly excited about the year to come?
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