I have never had the security of a 9 to 5 job or a monthly salary - should I really be using the word “security” during times like these? - but I love what I do and I can often be fairly flexible around work and kids and their school and all the outdoor stuff they do in the evenings and at weekends etc. It would have been an offence against the fishing gods if I hadn’t nipped out fishing first thing this morning with the forecast and the time of high water, and as per my blog post from Friday, I am quite keen to keep the fishing gods nice and happy at the moment………………..
Occasionally they do actually get the weather forecast spot on, and I found a good bit of bounce on the sea, lovely green water, a strongish sidewind, and the tides are really big which I don’t necessarily love but I’ll take it for where I went. I’ve got an interesting new surface lure here which I really wanted to try out, and where I chose to fish this morning does tend to throw up bass off the top, but with the sea conditions and the height of the tide I was higher up the rocks than I’d ideally like to be and it was evident very quickly that together with the fairly lively sidewind, trying to work surface lures was going to be nigh on impossible. I had put my brand new mackerel colour IMA Hound Glide in my lure box this morning though because I wanted to try it out as well. I can try and convince myself that bass might like a mackerel coloured Hound Glide all I like, but at the end of the day they look lovely and I am a complete sucker for the shiny stuff.
And it went and worked, and on my first cast with my new Hound Glide as well. I have fished with Hound Glides since they first came into the UK and I know how well they “bite” into the sort of conditions I had this morning. I can feel that sidewind tugging at my braid and trying to literally lift the lure out of the water, but no, the Hound Glide flies out there and grips good and proper. I didn’t land a bass over say 3lbs this morning, but I caught a load of them, and it was such good fun to be out and about “researching” for work purposes of course.
I reckon I landed three bass almost one after the other on my new Hound Glide, but I went and unclipped it. I remove the middle treble from all hard lures like this, and I also crush all my barbs, but those first three bass absolutely engulfed the lure for some reason this morning. I reckon I got them all back okay, but I couldn’t go near the water to hold the fish for unhooking and if I ended up with a particularly badly hooked fish I didn’t fancy my chances of being able to return it. Do you find that some sessions the fish just engulf the lures that bit more? Perhaps I have got so used to how easy it is to unhook bass when I am fishing with a big 6/0 weedless, barbless hook, and by no means would I expect other anglers to do what I chose to do this morning - but at least I know that my new mackerel colour Hound Glide works and I feel better about being so weak!
It was pretty obvious that there were a bunch of fish around this morning, but off comes my Hound Glide and on goes something which I have been meaning to try for a while now - these Savage Gear Gravity Stick Paddletails and Pulsetails rigged on a regular J-hook jig head and then fish them like I would a hard lure. Whack ‘em out and wind ‘em in. A while back I had cut the head off a Paddletail and a Pulsetail to shorten them down a bit, and then rigged them on a 15g size 5/0 hook Savage Gear Ball Jig Head which I “discovered” in the catalogue recently and asked to get hold of some for a bit of a try. I have never seen these jig heads in any tackle shops, but I like the look of them and they aren’t very expensive. Nobody ever asked me to try them out but I have been wanting to see how these Gravity Sticks might fish like this. As with the Hound Glide I could get all the grip I needed with the conditions I had this morning, and with a slightly cut down Gravity Stick rigged on these jig heads I reckon they were casting pretty damn well - and the bass loved them, plus it was so much easier to unhook them and get them back.
There were plenty of bass around for a while this morning so I am sure they’d have hit all manner of lures, but when I get the sense that there are a few fish around and I do like to have a bit of a play. I don’t count bass and I have no idea how many I went and landed this morning, but it was plenty, they were mostly on the small side, I caught enough to now feel completely confident that “my” Gravity Sticks rigged on regular J-hook jig heads work well - and I have come back to work with my head full of ideas about more stuff that we might be able to do with these soft plastics in the future. Nobody has ever paid me to go fishing, but by going fishing this morning I have a lot more ideas and plans for fishing related stuff so in my head I’m calling it work……………...
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