I have numerous strengths and weaknesses as a human being and angler, but being a bloke I am quite possibly less inclined to admit to my faults than I should be. One thing though that I do pride myself on having is an inherent interest in people, and a lot of that I put down to my dad who was so genuinely interested in other people and what motivated them to live interesting lives. He would talk for ages to my two girls about running and sailing and their studies and so on, because he was genuinely fascinated in what makes them happy and motivated………….
Anyway, whilst I am not a hugely social creature by nature, I do love fishing with other people who I like and trust and respect. Most people I spend time with will have no idea how much time I spend watching them and how they fish or move around for example. I am genuinely interested in how other anglers fish, I get a lot of ideas about fishing tackle development like this, I enjoy figuring out what sort of characters other anglers are and how much they are interested themselves in other anglers (you know how little interest I have in experts), and of course I will always pick something new or thought provoking up at some point.
When I started working with Savage Gear, from the off Mads told me to think about fishing tackle that I wanted to fish with - as in don’t try to make fishing tackle which you think might please other anglers. What he was saying was that he trusted me as a person and an angler to be rounded enough in my mainly bass fishing outlook that the stuff I wanted to fish with myself would have enough appeal to other anglers as well. If it didn’t I would not be working with them I guess, but as much as I try to take the gear we make and/or are developing and fish it/use it in as many different ways as possible, there will always be anglers out there who then take products I have had a hand in and do something a bit different with them. Surely that is how fishing works? I come back to my inherent interest in other anglers and how they fish, because a big part of my job is to collate that sort of information to help my thinking process.
I can’t prove it but for a fair while now I have thought that the simple looking Sandeel Pencil and Sandeel Pencil SW in its three different lengths (90mm, 125mm, 150mm) is perhaps the most misunderstood lure we make for the bass fishing market. Before I ever started working with Savage Gear I was asking some contacts of mine at the company if they could please make a fixed-hook version of their popular Line-Thru Sandeel, so it’s not as if the Sandeel Pencil and Sandeel Pencil SW (saltwater) were a great big leap of faith to bring to market. I can’t exactly claim the lure was mine as such, but I do know that I did start that push for the fixed-hook version, but I also recognise that some anglers are a bit freaked out at fishing with a lure on a straight-retrieve which looks to be doing so little (less is so often more!). I have kinda “seen” the Sandeel Pencil in slightly different ways depending on how and where I have been using it, but over time I have essentially settled on it in my head as a sort of long-range soft plastic with how shallow and subtly it swims on a straight retrieve. It’s a hard lure of course, but you get my drift.
But thanks mainly to John Quinlan who I work with over in Kerry, the Sandeel Pencil has also opened itself up to me as an effective lure to drift in a fast run of current, whereas like with soft plastics you can let the current do the work. Granted it’s got to be a fast run of current to dead-drift a hard lure which wants to sink like this, but if you have got that sort of water you can match the size/weight of the Sandeel Pencil to the strength of the current and the depth of the water. It works, as per above.
And then over in Kerry the other day I watched as John clipped on the little Sandeel Pencil SW 90 on for one of our clients. We were fishing a shallow reef where there were definitely a lot of mullet mooching around, and this often means that bass are in amongst them - but we weren’t catching for some reason. There was also a lot of weed around which was making the fishing a bit awkward, but we should have been catching. I liked John’s thinking with changing down to a smaller profile lure, but for all the different types of ground and conditions I have fished the Sandeel Pencils myself, I had never, ever done what John got one of lads to do with the lure.
If this seems obvious to you then so be it, but John got this lad to cast the lure out, snap his balearm over the moment it hit the water, and then fish with his rod tip up and work the little Sandeel Pencil 90 basically like a faster surface lure. Now in fact the lure is sort of “walking and twitching” just under the surface when you fish it like this, but it bloody well went and worked, and in no time at all we had the other lads fishing like this and hooking bass. I don’t know if the little internal rattles in these Sandeel Pencil lures help when working it more like a surface lure, but not for one second can I pretend that I had ever thought of fishing any of the three sizes of Sandeel Pencils like this. I don’t know where and when this might work again, but for whatever reason for part of that session the bass wanted a little lure worked in a specific way which I had never envisaged when I was pushing for the fixed-hook version a few years back. I bet you can almost visualise the cogs in my head which were whirring away when I saw John suggest this method to one of our lads! Watch and learn, watch and learn…………….
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