I always carry some smaller lures with me because I think they can make a real difference sometimes

You know how certain things stick in your head? I remember fishing with a mate a few years ago and he was using a smaller paddletail that I’d have more usually turned to - and it was working really well. “What’s that lure you’ve got on Mark?” I say, to which he replies “a little Slender Scoop Shad”. “You sneaky git” I reply, “where the bloody hell did you get that?”. “You gave me some Henry!”. “Did I?!”. I had started to catch bass on the larger 13cm and 15cm Savage Gear Slender Scoop Shads, but I didn’t recall ever seeing the smaller 11cm version. But it turned out that I already had a few and forgot about them, most likely because they looked a bit small. How wrong I was………….

I remember a good few occasions when the smaller 4.5”” OSP DoLive Stick has outfished the larger/regular and frigging deadly 6’’ version. We had numerous occasions in Ireland with our anglers over the last couple of weeks when smaller paddletails, metals and surface lures did better business on the bass than larger lures. Those little 16g and 23g Seekers never leave my lure box for example. One of our lads turned up with these lovely looking little 4’’ paddletails called the “Fat Stu” (you can get them off Ebay here). Do I need more lures? Obviously not. Did I order some when I got home? Have a guess.

We had a session on a rock mark in Kerry which I seriously doubt has been fished since John and I were last there with our anglers at least a couple of years ago. We have caught a mixture of bass, wrasse and pollack there in the past, but on the session we fished the other day we saw a lot of pollack, a few wrasse, yet no bass. What was really noticeable was one angler landing some cracking pollack, and he was using what most of us would call a “small lure”. The deadly little Fiiish Black Minnow 90 to be precise. I have seen a lot of good bass come to this smaller size of Black Minnow over the years.

Then we had a session out on the boat and the pollack fishing was on fire. Our anglers had a few fish on the Savage Gear Sandeel V2 Weedless which I had brought along in the new colours, but without a doubt the pollack were way more switched on to smaller lures. John had a load of simple 30g casting jigs on board and they were absolutely deadly. One of the pollack wouldn’t go back - they do get eaten, the food on these trips is fantastic! - and when John filleted the fish back at the ranch, its stomach was full of small sprats. Which looked remarkably similar in shape and size to those little casting jigs. Matching the hatch and all that? There was a lot of bait on the sounder and I guess the pollack were really dialled in on it.

Next on my list of fishing stuff to do is to see if I can find any difference with smaller creature baits. It’s a bit harder to do because this creature bait style of bass fishing in the estuaries doesn’t tend to produce big numbers of bass, so your comparisons are more tricky. The smaller 2.5’’ Nikko Craw creature bait looks fantastic and I am interested to see how it compares to the larger 3.2’’ Nikko Craw. I guess that some of us get into this bass fishing thing and just assume that these amazing predators are chowing down on bigger prey species like mackerel, big sandeels, big shore crabs, baby pollack and so on, when in fact I don’t think we know nearly enough about what they feed on at different times of the year and in different environments……………

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