How I was lured in.

When I bump into other anglers who don’t really fish with lures, they always call our approach ‘spinning’ based on the constant retrieve of a lot of our methods.

For example they will normally look at my gear and ask….. “You just spinning then?”

As those who have fallen into this inescapable trap will know there is a lot more to lure fishing than spinning them in 😀.

As for my own experience/story. Paul ‘Bassman’ Gordon really hit the nail on the head when he joked about ruining my ‘rubber fetish’ post by talking about catching bass using bait. I have well and truly become obsessed with lures to the point where I don’t really fish any other methods at all.

I have been in love with fishing since I caught my first fish at about 17 years old. But my lure fishing obsession only started after I watched an old Henry Gilbey fishing video someone shared on YouTube where he was catching bass on bits of plastic on the Irish coast.

How simple it looked. No rig as such, no heavy lead, no 13ft beach caster and multiplier reels. No smelly baits, seat boxes, rig wallets…….. the list goes on. Was this the simplest form of fishing?

After becoming a dad and settling into an ‘adult relationship’ my fishing time had reduced 10 fold. I had become accustomed to taking a seatbox, a quiver with a range of rods and a rucksack full of gear for every session. Fishing wasn’t simple at all. I needed fresh bait, pre-tied rigs, the right tide and a strong heart to handle the tackle losses that most who fish in Plymouth have become accustomed too.

To be successful in this kind of fishing I felt I needed to plan in advance and be flexible to fish the right locations and conditions at the right time and I just wasn’t able to do that. By 2012/2013 I had pretty much stopped bait fishing (and almost all fishing in general).

I had accumulated so much (must have) tackle that I no longer wanted to carry it with me. To make it worth dragging all the gear out I would have needed plenty of time to fish the mark which I rarely did.

In hindsight now, I know I could have got away with a rucksack and a rod and just the tackle I need for one session. I also didn’t drive in those days meaning I was relying on lifts or walking to marks making flexibility even harder.

So………… Here was Henry on the telly with so little end tackle (you could almost transport it in your pocket) and a light rod (with fixed spool reel) setup staying mobile enough to be moving around to find the fish.

Now that last point was the key for me.

I’d been spinning before. Whenever I had bait fished I took a spare rod (usually my lightest rod and reel) and span Dexter wedges, Eddystone eels or sabiki rigs whilst I waited for bites on my bait and float rods.

I had plenty of fish on the sabiki rigs including many rockfish such as wrasses, gobies, a mullet (was a baby) as well as Pollack by the dozen. I even had a few fish on the spinners (mainly mackerel).

But I was just casting and retrieving and hoping for the best. No real art to it at all. No thought for time, tide of any form of matching the hatch it was more of a boredom cure as I am not a ‘sit and wait’ kind of guy.

So after seeing the excitement of bass smashing into lures and providing real good sport on light tackle I was dying to get out and nail some bigger fish on lures. And of course…… it looked easy on the telly…….

My first real go at it was in the summer of 2015 when a former school buddy was sharing pictures of bass he was catching on FaceBook from a mark local to my home fishing marks. I asked to join him on a trip where he was spinning soft plastics over the mark and witnessed his brother catch a lovely little bass just as the sun was coming up. I didn’t manage any fish myself that session, but seeing it done with my own eyes gave me enough confidence to try the same approach again by myself.

Sure enough 4am the next morning (in total darkness) I was up and out and on that same rock casting and retrieving and very soon catching my very first (shore caught) bass on a lure. ‘WOW….. that was easy’ i thought!

My setup was a joke by most lure anglers standards. A rod called a ‘Crosbow Spinning Rod’ it was rated 5-30g casting weight and cost me the total of £9.99 on eBay including postage. It was paired up with a huge fixed spool reel called something like the ‘Kingfisher flyfish’ which I’m pretty sure I got second hand also from ebay for less than £10. My line was cheap 10lb mono and it was tied straight to a (still favourite) ‘sidewinder sandeel’ lure.
Total cost of everything I was using was less than £25. I have used that rod since to catch plenty of fish and even after buying more expensive rods I still use it for any lure fishing on my local canal where I am chucking lures over 7g in weight.

Fancy tackle helps, but you don’t need to spend buckets to get the fish you dream of!

I doubt you will find a better spinning rod anywhere for less than £30. It is perfect for hooking, playing and controlling most sizes of fish and unless it snaps or falls to bits (hasn’t in 10 years of use) I won’t replace it.

For the next year I pretty much only targeted bass and only in daylight hours. (my future wife isn’t keen on my 4am starts) I wasn’t fishing at specific marks which I thought would produce bass either which was pretty daft. I would set my son up on a rig with ragworm baits and spin beside him half heartedly hoping for a bit if luck. It didn’t come.

Pretty much blanking for a whole year really sucked! I had some mackerel in the summer on metals and a few wrasse on ragworm and one really good session on pollock but the rest of the year was awful in terms of success and embarrasing when telling people about m fishing when they asked.

In 2017, as I have mentioned in other posts, I changed my approach to fishing completely. I had told my doubters (jokers) that I was going to start actually catching some fish and i was pretty damn confident that I could improve tenfold.

I suppose I changed my luck for myself by targeting smaller fish and concentrating on methods and how to best go about improving my catch rate. It was my year of studying, learning, experimenting and gaining valuable knowledge and experience. I got back to what I loved most about fishing. The fact that it is fun!

I started by doing what I knew worked best which was fishing with ragworm. I don’t think I have ever not caught fish whilst using it. Once our bait ran out, the light rod I was using was perfect for a little ‘spinning’. Using a worm lure close in around the gullies that I had been fishing with the ragworm, I was very quickly able to catch my first wrasse on a lure. I was using a mullet spoon with an assist hook tipped with gulp sandworm. Catching my first wrasse on a lure was key to my confidence.

I immediately switched off ragworm again and concentrated on the lures.

I found out about gulp, Isome and Ecogear lures and how these smaller lures can be used for smaller species. The added scent on some brands also makes a serious difference to catch rates with some species.

On one session for example I used ‘Gulp fish fry’ on a jig head for perch in the local canal and had about 40 fish in an hour long session. They were all small (or wasps as some people call them) but it was great fun on ultra-light tackle and I was catching fish!

I started to really scale down tactics starting with dropshotting for wrasse and very soon after I invested in my first LRF outfit. Since then I have only used my heavier outfits on a few occasions as it has been so much fun trying to add new species to my list and even trying to play larger fish on very light tackle. I have a surreal confidence from the lighter setup at the moment and find even with bigger fish my presentation on these light setups is improving my catch rates.

LRF/UL Fishing has provided me with new options such as fishing in rockpools for gobies and blennies, added to a more subtle approach to surface and midwater spinning for pollock, bass, mackerel etc. and dropshotting in gullies and harbours has caught all kinds of surprises.

But it hadn’t helped me to capturing that trophy sea bass I had yearned for so hard. I know from my own research that bass fishing like with many other species is about location, conditions and tide. With so little access to the coast I am not in a position to put the hours in and learn how many marks fish so I took the cheat option of hiring a guide from www.southdevonbassguide.com.

Check out my other blog posts to see how that went! 😎.

My guide had spent many years studying his patch in Devon fishing through light and dark across a range of conditions and states of tide and documenting catches to identify patterns so he could give himself and his clients the very best possible chances of catching these stunning fish.

I have only been back out in search of bass once since that session and hired Marc again to guide my son Owen along side me.

It’s incredible how much knowledge we soaked in and how much more confident I would now feel heading back out on my own.

The next stage of my journey is to really develop my techniques and add skills to my arsenal. I still have very minimal experience of fishing with topwater lures so the summer months of 2018 have seen me searching out perch at home in Ash Vale and I managed a topwater pollock on an LRF lure in Plymouth.

As for spinning. I can’t possibly resist a play with some hard fighting mackerel and herring on LRF gear if I can find some. So small metal jigs such as the HTO fugitive will be my lead tactic to putting a bend in my 0.5-8g range setups and provide serious fun!

I must admit to getting caught up in a bit of lure buying frenzy but not to the crazy standards of some of you. I have probably spent about £100 On lures over 2-3 years but have been lucky enough to have won a similar amounts worth in online competitions (Thank you to ecogear and Lure Mayhem) and my amazing fiance also pitched in with some really cool bass lures including my first collection of hard plastics for my birthday in 2017.

So I now have a good range of light options for ultralight fishing and also some bigger lures for targeting bass, pollock and wrasse for when I can be convinced to put down the LRF outfits.

Other things I have bought include some line and reel upgrades. I don’t use mono at all anymore as I don’t like the stretch. I use quality braid (in my opinion) and also flurocarbon. The reels are smaller and more balanced to the rods I am using making fishing more comfortable and fun and dramatically improving my casting ability.

I carry a shoulder lure bag, which can carry too good sized lure boxes as well as having pouches for tackler/accessories tools etc. I have used caribiners to attach a landing net, unhooking mat, split ring pliers/snips and a medical style long nosed distorted meaning everything I need on a session is to hand.

I also use mini lure boxes that fit in my pocket for rig accessories including hooks, dropshots etc. With a zip lock style packet of soft plastics (usually a mix of lures) I often don’t need to use anything except what I carry in my pockets.

Travelling light in this way means I can use a small corner of my car boot and keep everything I need for fishing ready to go for quick impromptu sessions and allows me to move freely between marks to avoid bad conditions or fish different terrains depending on tide state.

So the species are cool, the tackle is light and I am able to keep very mobile. So its no wander I was ‘lured in’ by fishing with artificials.

Oh and to make life even harder, some of the are shiny!!!