This blog post is not going to make much sense unless you stop right now and watch the new video below which is from Ultimate Fishing over in France. If you do but you don’t speak French, make sure to click on the “CC” button to turn on the Closed Captions/Subtitles (on my Mac it’s at the bottom left of the screen, I think it’s on the top right on an iPhone), and then you need to go into the Settings (gear icon, where you would more usually go to change the resolution of a video), click on Subtitles/CC which pops up in a sub menu (it’s called Subtitles/CC on my Mac but it’s called Captions on my iPhone when I do this). Now you need to either scroll through the language options and click on English, or else whatever you are watching the video knows this already and has set auto-translate to English already. Still with me? I understand just about enough French to note that YouTube is actually making a pretty good attempt at translating spoken French into English subtitles…………..
Anyway, so if you are now here then I am going to assume you have watched this video. It’s presented by a French angler called Nicolas Cadiou who I believe is a bit of a wizard at estuary based fishing especially for some rather nice bass. Obviously this video from Ultimate Fishing is partly about a new to their market soft plastic lure which they are starting to stock and distribute and of course they need to sell this item - welcome to the real world! - but I also choose to give them and the angler a hell of a lot of credit. The information they put across about how to fish with this rather wrasse-looking MegaBass Sleeper Gill soft plastic and how it differs slightly to their MegaBass Dark Sleeper which I made reference to in this blog post here from a while back is pretty comprehensive.
Forget about the brand of the lure for a second here, and instead think about the design of the lure itself and how it’s designed to work. It’s subtly unlike anything I own or use myself. I believe that like the MegaBass Dark Sleeper, this Sleeper Gill was designed by MegaBassfor the freshwater bass market. I have been looking around at these types of lures and my research leads me as it often does to the massive US fishing tackle market. Don’t quote me here but I think that this Sleeper Gill lure is designed to imitate a species of fish called a bluegill which I presume largemouth bass feed on. Go looking and there are a fair few of these types of lure design in the US now and they still tend to refer to them as swimbaits which is actually a very large category of lures over there. When I started looking around I found out that Savage Gear USA also does a version of this type of lure which they call the Structure Gill and which I presume is for the freshwater bass market as well.
I haven’t seen any of these lures in the flesh save for a couple of the MegaBass Dark Sleepers which a mate of mine bought and then caught a couple of bass on almost straight away, but I would suggest that just from the video and then thinking about the design of the lure and where the weight is rather cleverly placed within the body of the lure that they might give us (sea) bass anglers a few different options. Fast current in an estuary aside, when I want to bump and work soft plastics along the bottom over say a reef I will either turn to “my” Savage Gear Sandeel V2 Weedless or Savage Gear Savage Minnow Weedless, or else I will use a Gravity Stick on a weedless hook and put one of the Balls Clip On Weights onto the eye of the hook.
You know how lures like that are working, but it looks to me like a lure such as the Sleeper Gill from that video is working in a different way. The placement of the internal weight and the rather clever way the J-hook is essentially hidden away in the dorsal fin of the lure seems to promote a level-swim when you slowly retrieve the lure on the correct angle. I don’t know how much that might mean to you, but I find it fascinating for certain applications. I obviously need to get hold of some of these types of lures myself before I can remotely get to grips with what they might or indeed might not end up doing for me, but my brain is bouncing away with a few ideas. If you want to get some of these MegaBass Sleeper Gill and Dark Sleeper lures then go to the consistently excellent Mr.Fish website here and there you shall find them.
I found it fascinating in the video when Nicolas made reference to his belief that bigger, wary bass can spook when they hear that noise which a lure like the Fiiish Black Minnow or our Sandeel V2 Weedless might make when you bump it along a harder sea bed especially. Give me a bouncy sea out on the open coast when I’m bumping weedless soft plastics over a snaggy reef and I happen to believe that the noise which the jig head and quite possibly a glass rattle makes when they bump along the bottom can work as a kind of dinner bell. I obviously can’t prove it but it’s what I happen to think.
But now take that sort of noise into a really quiet estuary where Nicolas is fishing in this new video and what he is saying has to make some sense, and especially when he very obviously has a huge amount more experience on estuary bass than somebody like me does. If there is one thing that bass fishing has taught me it’s that there are so many different ways to skin the proverbial cat. We are coming to the end of the year and yet again there are so many different things that I want to try out next year that I haven’t done before or which I think I could mix into some of what I am already doing. At the very least it’s an interesting video with some nice bass which in turn gets me bouncing away about various locations I have walked past with Storm but haven’t actually fished…………….
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