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Posted 06:46, 16 May 2012
- I think I have only run one competition on this blog before, but the time has come to run another one, and it’s principally due to the good people who are bringing the Japanese lure rod brand Major Craft into the UK. Never heard of them ? You will. Believe me, they seem to make a lure rod at almost every single price point for the kinds of fishing we do here in the UK and Ireland, and in Japan Major Craft is one of the big players when it comes to rods. The fact that I can offer one of their rods for a blog competition rather floats my boat. I have fished with the rod on offer (not the exact same rod you might be winning of course, it is not second hand !!) and, I have considered rigging the competition so that I can win it myself !! It’s a pretty special lure rod……….
- Let’s do things a bit backwards and start with the prize itself – the competition entry requirements will come a bit further down the page. The prize on offer is a Major Craft Crostage CRS-762M/S Hard Rock Game lure rod – it’s 7’6’’ long, rated to fish 7-28g with a Fast action. I believe it retails here in the UK around the £200 mark (see here), and from my own experience with this rod I reckon it represents some seriously good value for money. If you have any interest at all in bumping all manner of soft plastics around for our wrasse then I think you might find this rod to be just about perfect. Bearing in mind that I am doing my best to learn as much as I can about wrassing on plastics, I think I can pretty much understand how this Crostage Hard Rock rod was designed to work. I have fished various plastics with it and caught a bunch of (smallish) wrasse and it just feels like a totally natural extension of my arm if that makes sense. It just feels “right”. Almost scary sensitive to the point that I felt I was successfully almost teasing the more hesitant wrasse into nailing my lures by bumping the lures just away and waiting for them to hit again. Talk about electric bites through the rod. Stacks of grunt but huge amounts of finesse (me ? Yes !! I am finally finding my inner finesse, although I do still rather like blasting and cranking hard lures. It’s never too late). I have only used a few “specialist rock fishing lure rods”, but I am learning what they are designed to do and this Crostage Hard Rock is one hell of a lot of rod. There is also a lighter rated model (5-18g) that I would hazard a guess is something pretty interesting as well (see here).
- Although I see why it works so well for rock fishing with lures, I also reckon it would make a pretty awesome “do it all” lure rod if you are into rods under the 8’ mark. And lots of anglers do seem to be. I don’t kayak fish myself, but I have a hunch that this Crostage might just fit the bill on this front, plus of course from the boat. Very, very manageable. The handle is a little shorter than regular which I find perfect for fishing “rod tip up” for wrasse (where the handle ends up sitting naturally under your forearm and then stays in place when you strike a fish hard and away from sanctuary in one movement), and after a few chucks with the more regular hard lures it all feels very normal to me. This Crostage Hard Rock rod is the first Major Craft rod that I have played and fished with and I am dead impressed. As I said, if at the end of the day a potentially fictional/dubious sounding character wins this competition then you might well question whether it’s me not being able to resist the lure of this rather special rod !!
- Anyway, the competition. What do you need to do to be in with a chance of winning ? Very simple really. In no more than 100 words I would like you to tell me why lure fishing in saltwater does it for you. I don’t care what you lure fish for (in saltwater) and I don’t care how you go about describing to me how lure fishing does it for you, but the winner will be the person who inspires me the most. The angler who via their 100 words max makes my heart race faster and gets my adrenaline going because their love for the sport has come across so effectively, that will be the person who wins the rod. I am not going to ask for grammatically perfect paragraphs, but please bear in mind that if I am struggling to read and/or understand what you have written then it will not stand a chance (hint – spellcheck and no capitals for what you might think is extra emphasis !!). And flat out any use of any kind of text speak will warrant your entry null and void – you know I despise it big time. I am not asking for excessively flowery language and complex sentence structures, just good old fashioned English the way it was meant to be (m8 ?). Make me want to go out lure fishing because of what you have written…………….
- Now here is how to get your words to me (and remember, 100 words max) – I am going to ask you to get them to me in two ways, and I need you to do both just in case one method fails etc. First off, please leave your entry in the comments section at the bottom of this blog post – at the end of your entry please do this - “blah, blah, blah (your words of wisdom)” – X number of words (the exact word count please, e.g. 96 words) - submitted by Spiky Bass (your first and last names). Then please email that same entry to my email address on this Contact Me page of my website here – the subject of the email needs to read “Major Craft blog competition”. Please submit it in the same way as you have done in the comments section (word count and name) and I can then file them away and keep them safe here on my computer. Please, please make sure to put your postal address at the bottom of the email so that the rod can be sent out in case you win. But note, please do not send me any attachments (Word, PDFs etc.) – it’s only 100 words max, so please put the words within your actual email. Any attachments will render the entry null and void. Does that all make sense ? I have put a sample in the comments section of this post to help out.
- The competition will run until Friday 15th June which happens to be the last day of the bass close season in Ireland, and sometime during the week starting Monday 18th June I will announce the winner. Please rest assured that your emails/postal addresses that you send me as entries will be going nowhere else but my Inbox (apart from the winner’s address which of course will go to Nice Fish for the prize to be sent out), and I would ask that no journalists/writers enter the competition. By entering you are accepting that I will of course post the winning entry up on my blog (obviously !!), and from time to time during the competition I might publish a few entries up on the blog that have really got me going. I hope this all makes sense. Go for it and I can’t wait to read your ramblings !! My thanks to Nice Fish for putting such an awesome prize up.
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Posted 08:32, 16 April 2012
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- The Angling Trust has launched a new campaign called “Just Take 5” that is a move to encourage us anglers to spend a few extra minutes picking up litter when we are out fishing. This has to be a good thing and I hope that an initiative like this makes more anglers feel that extra bit of responsibility for “our” fantastic coastline that so many of us almost take for granted. We all despise litter and it’s the least we can do to take a look around us and pick up bits and pieces of litter that other people leave behind. As to that very small percentage of anglers who leave fishing related litter behind themselves – don’t even get me started on that one………..
- There is a very interesting article about the fishing tackle market in Japan in this month’s Tackle Trade World. A few years ago I had little or no idea as to how big recreational fishing was in Japan, indeed it is very easy as an angler to forget that there may well be millions of other anglers around the world who actually fish in similar ways to you – or just as likely fish in completely different ways which might well be worth learning about. The article says that Japan as a country has a population just below 130 million people, and that there are somewhere between 12-20 million anglers. Think about 12-20 million anglers as a percentage of the total population and then you might begin to understand just how huge fishing is in Japan. The total value of angling to Japan’s economy is said to be worth around $6 billion. Saltwater lure fishing is rated the most popular fishing discipline with 22% of anglers (but then 15% of anglers are quoted as doing saltwater jigging – and to me jigging is lure fishing. So does it actually mean that 37% of anglers participate in some kind of saltwater lure fishing ? Holy cow…….), but I do find it “interesting” that in an article such as this that saltwater lure fishing for their various (sea) bass species does not even get a mention alongside the rock and squid fishing etc. I put this down to the simple fact that language differences are just so huge that certain details are getting lost in translation so to speak. Tackle Trade World is a trade magazine, but you can very easily click here and read the online version of it for free. Well worth it I reckon.
- I am getting more and more feedback and questions about going wrasse fishing with soft plastics – a new short series of mine has just started in this month’s Sea Angler magazine (check here), but I have also put up a photo essay on my website that is called “A very basic guide to wrasse fishing with soft plastic lures” (see here). Yes, it’s simple in the extreme, but I firmly believe that at its core, wrassing on plastics is also a very simple thing to do – and I hope that some of you might find this short photo essay to be of some use in getting you started in this awesome fishing. Sea Angler though is the place where I can go into details far more. All feedback/constructive criticism is as usual most welcome.
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Posted 07:35, 11 April 2012
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- Don’t you love it when you can feel things coming back to life after the winter slumber ? Loads more birds are singing, the grass is growing, the wild garlic is going haywire, and some of our fish species seem to be working out that it’s ok to chow lures with a bit more relish. It was not that many years ago that I used to almost suffer through summer while I was waiting for the cod fishing to rumble into life again, but these days I am far happier when the temperatures begin to warm up as we roll from spring into summer. Is that a sign of getting older ? I had a feeling that the warm weather we had a couple of weeks ago when I actually went out wrasse fishing in a pair of shorts was going to be but a mere glimpse of summer, but Easter’s done and dusted and it has to be onwards and upwards from here……………or is that the kiss of death ?
- I read a report of some outstanding wrassing on plastics somewhere in Cornwall over the Easter weekend, and it was topped off by an awesome fish of over 7lbs !! Check here for the details. Wow. That is some wrasse to catch via any method, but yet again it proves how lethally effective lure fishing for them is, and I am rather pleased of course that Sea Angler have just published a feature of mine on wrasse fishing with plastics. I did not know until the magazine dropped through my door that I had got the front cover with a shot of Keith and a Jersey wrasse that he nailed on a soft plastic. Great timing !! I have promised myself that I am going to be doing a lot more local fishing this year to get myself out of the office and out doing what I love the most, and when conditions go pants for the bass I will be out and about wrassing as much as possible. I had a few smallish ones during that hot spell, but it was weird how they started to really come on the feed later in the tide but then went off like a switch when the sun dipped behind the cliffs. It really seems that going after these rockfish with the lures has kicked on a level as regards anglers going out and doing it.
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- I heard of a few small bass taken on lures around here, but I would hope now that with the change of wind direction that the fishing should start to pick up now and continue to build. It seems to be the case around where I live in south east Cornwall that it is very much worth going after the bass well into January with the lures, but then things seem to quickly tail off for a couple of months as the depths of winter sets in – even though we had a very mild winter down here. Is this something new, or is it more the case that lure anglers are increasingly looking to tear the rule books up and keep on at it ? Why on earth then does somewhere like that glorious Kerry coastline in Ireland consistently produce its best surf fishing for bass during January, February and March, conditions depending of course ? If there is one thing I am going to do before long it’s travel over there during the depths of winter and shoot some classical surf fishing photos and then convert them to black and white. It would be a gamble as regards conditions, but how awesome could it be if things went well ?
- Over the last couple of weeks I have been getting reports from southern Ireland of some insane lure fishing for bass. I know of some serious fish that have been taken on baits during the winter, but it seems that the lure fishing has now kicked off in serious style. One guy went out and had eighteen bass to 10lbs one morning during that warm spell, and that to anybody is world class fishing. My friend Ger Carey took two double figure fish on bait in one night session a few weeks back – a bass of 10lbs, and one close to 15lbs, and I know that he had a follow from a fish on his lure the other day that apparently rather shocked him !! I am over there in early May which will be the earliest in the year that I have gone over for a bass fishing/photography trip, so we shall see what happens. I hope to see some of you at the first Irish Bass Festival in July as well………..
