or profile of your lure make a difference to your catch rates? — Henry Gilbey

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How often might the size and/or profile of your lure make a difference to your catch rates?

There are many things which I find fascinating about this guiding work I do, with the not actually fishing bit perhaps being the most interesting. Because you get to watch people fish, you are going to see things you might not see if you were fishing yourself (guides don’t fish with their clients unless they are helping somebody out with tips and technique), and from time to time you get to make a positive impact upon their actual fishing experience. I am a watcher of other anglers anyway, regardless of whether I am fishing, taking photos or guiding, indeed one of the biggest things I will never understand in fishing is not watching what other anglers do and asking questions because you are naturally interested. I see some mighty fine anglers around and about at times, but on the flipside I often wonder how some of these good local anglers would cope outside of their comfort zones because you can’t fake that lack of interest in the wider world of everything……………..

Anyway, so we were with our second group of lads the other day out in Kerry and we were fishing a high water shallow reef where numbers of fish will often congregate when the weather is warm. You know as well as I do that if something a bit different is going on then it’s far more apparent when there are a fair few fish around and also a few anglers fishing for them. We had one of those situations where two lads were standing pretty close to each other and one was catching but the other wasn’t. The other two lads were a bit further away and doing just fine, but with a good number of bass around it was very obvious that something needed to change for the lad who wasn’t catching.

I often wonder after a blank session what I might have done wrong. For sure there might well have been no bass around and my epic failure wasn’t really my fault, but some underwater footage we shot of pollack and wrasse fishing when we were filming out in Kerry a while back didn’t half open our eyes. Firstly when the pollack fishing went quiet there were still a load of fish mooching around our lures but not hitting them – fish aren’t always hungry, surely? – and secondly that wrasse definitely do chase lures and don’t just sit there defending their territory as I have heard some anglers claim. More so though it rammed home the point that when we thought there weren’t any fish around, there often were, and I wonder how many times this happens with bass fishing. Were there fish around when we blanked, and could we have changed something to get a fish or two? How often do we go through our lure box but what we clip on tends to be a similar length and/or profile all the time?

So John Quinlan walked over to the two lads to check things over. One lad was fishing and catching with the (small size and narrow profile) Savage Gear Sandeel Pencil 90 (mm) and the other lad was fishing but blanking with the slightly longer but still very narrow profile Sandeel Pencil 125 (mm). John changed the lad with the Sandeel Pencil 125 over to a shorter 90 size, and bang, he hooked a bass on his first cast with it, and then proceeded to catch a few more along with the lad who was already fishing with that exact lure. I guess there could be a few different factors involved here which we might never realise because we aren’t fish, but when you are dealing with nature and natural instinct, could something as simple as the length and/or profile of the lure make all the difference? It seemed to be the case here, and I have seen this kind of thing happen a number of times now. A friend called me an hour ago in fact to say that he had bass busting on some sort of bait literally right in front of him in the small waves, but when he called me he could not catch them. I am waiting to hear how he got on with a bit more time, but the first thing I suggested was clipping on a considerably smaller lure.

I always remember a somewhat overbearing “expert” from Ireland telling me many years ago – and I mean telling me, he didn’t do discussion! – that you had to use really big lures for really big bass, and especially in autumn. It might well have worked well for him, but I still think about all the big say 8lb+ bass which I have seen and photographed over the years from the shore, and I can’t think of a single one which came on what I would call a big lure. For sure something like the longer Sandeel Pencil 150 (mm) might be a “long” lure when compared to the much smaller 90, but it’s not a “big” lure as regards profile and action. When the mackerel are in, are the bass feeding on them or are they feeding on what the mackerel are feeding on for example? We assume it has to be the mackerel, but how come they are often feeding together? When a big bass mooches around an area of bladderwrack in an estuary, is there anything really big as such in there for them to feed on? I don’t remotely have all the answers here by the way, but as ever I enjoy thinking about it and then putting it into practice……………….

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