I went for a bit of a play yesterday afternoon, and although there were birds working on something way out of range, I didn’t manage to trouble the scorer. To be honest though I really wanted to have a bit of a play with some of these “creature baits” as they seem to be known - soft plastics that look a bit like prawns and crawfish and crabs and so on. I wanted to see what sort of rigging might work, how they cast, how they fish through cover, how much I might snag up etc. I have a growing itch I need to scratch on a few specific locations where I know there are some good bass, but I haven’t been able to effectively fish precisely where I think I need to…………
If you lure fish in freshwater for species such as perch especially then I would imagine you are all over creature baits and how to fish them effectively. For a few years now my go-to soft plastic for wrasse fishing has been the deadly Z-Man Punch Craw-Z, and then last year over in Ireland I did really well on the Savage Gear Ned Salamander. Both these lures are made of that weird soft plastic which you can’t mix with anything else and which can also be a bit tricky to rig up, but wow do they last for ages if you don’t snag them up. I do like the fact that the material is incredibly buoyant so the lures literally stand up when fished on a simple Texas rig - I think wrasse really respond well to this - but in a perfect world I’d like there to be slightly larger/bulkier versions of both lures so I effectively stick a slightly bigger weedless hook in them for bass fishing (whilst bearing in mind that my bass fishing experience with these types of lures is precisely zero).
So I got hold of some of these Berkley Hollow Body Craw 10cm lures which you can see in the photos here. They look pretty good with one of the 4/0 Varivas Gran Hooking Master (Monster Class) weedless hooks in them- as per the photos - but I have also rigged one up with one of the 4/0 weedless corkscrew style hooks we do for the smaller 120mm size Gravity Sticks, and it looks fine to me. I clipped a little 10g (and horribly expensive) Berkley Klip Lok Tungsten weight into the eye of the Varivas weedless hook and fished away like that yesterday, but of course a regular Texas rig is going to work in much the same way. Now I know that the 4/0 hook from the 120mm Gravity Stick kits fits the Berkley Hollow Body Craw 10cm just fine as well, I am going to try it again with the much cheaper and very easy to use Savage Gear Balls Clip On weights. I need to experiment with different weights. A Texas rig is obviously very simple, but if I can avoid having to cut and retie my leader every time I want to try this setup then I will.
So if we take my experience with this stuff at level zero, looking at the lure in the water was quite something. On the packet it says that these Berkley Hollow Body Craw 10cm lures have floating claws and main body, and to be fair they do feel hollow to me. Whatever the case the lure stands up nicely in the water and it looks like serious bass food to me when the claws wave around in the water. I don’t know if it looks more like a crab or a prawn, but I am bloody convinced that bass will hit it if you fish it right.
Which I am not sure how to do yet, but I was surprised at how well the lure/hook/10g clip on weight combination cast, and then how slowly I could move it whilst feeling completely confident that with the lure literally just sitting there, it was doing something in the water. I was also surprised at how easily I could move the setup around the edges of the bladderwrack, and sometimes even right through it when you see those gaps in the weed. What I want to be able to do is sometimes cast the lure into the middle of weed beds and so on.
Go look on the internet and there are so many different types of these creature baits, so please take the gear I am talking about today with a big pinch of salt. I am at day one here, but I am very stubborn when an itch starts to grow. I will never say never in bass fishing and I really enjoy problem-solving. My problem is that I fish a few spots where I know there are some big bass which I haven’t been able to properly get at, so could this type of approach be a way of doing so? What I do know is that I can’t get those “claws” flapping around in the water out of my head, and I can promise you that if I do manage to work this out a bit and catch a few bass then I might pass out with excitement. From raging surf beaches to quiet as you like estuaries and little bays - did you ever imagine that one species of fish could be chased in so many different and interesting ways? And please, any advice and pointers with how to properly rig and fish these creature baits in saltwater is more than welcome…………….
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