So interesting to watch a good angler who fishes a lot with one particular lure and is very dialled into how to get the best out of it

I really enjoy meeting and spending time with good anglers who enjoy communicating about their fishing. I don’t mean that they should be divulging specifically where they fish because nobody would expect that. Nope, I love talking about how they go about their fishing and some of the stuff that they may well do but not actually realise how interesting and specific it might be to me because it’s just “normal” for them. At the new Irish Spring Angling Fair I got to meet a Wexford based bass junkie who I have been messaging back and forth with for a while now, and on the Monday after the show he kindly took me out fishing around his local waters……………

So the actual fishing was quiet, but Cormac landed a small one and what looked like a good bass came off in some wicked current. I couldn’t care less though because, thanks completely to this kind angler, I was experiencing a stretch of coastline I had never seen before. The fact that where Cormac chose to fish on Monday evening then combined with a rather lovely drop of light did it for me in a big way as well, but above all of is the fact that I got to spend a bit of time with a really interesting person who thinks about his bass fishing and really enjoys communicating about it. Surely fishing is so much about sharing what we do for the betterment of the sport and other anglers? I cannot help but doff my cap to anglers like Cormac, and it’s confirmation to me yet again that experts are best left well alone to dwell upon their own legend in their own lunchbox status. Sorry, I should not say stuff like that, but when you spend a couple of days at a fishing show talking to anglers for hours and hours, it doesn’t half bang home firstly how nice most anglers are, but secondly how many anglers can benefit from a little bit of help and advice. Me included.

Anyway, back to the point of the post. I guess we all have particular hard and soft lures which we trust more than others, and if we go fishing a fair bit then I would also guess that we end up fishing them in certain ways - because those ways have produced us fish and they make us feel confident. My mate Mark fishes with a bunch of different lures depending on locations and conditions, but I always notice how he fishes the original size Tackle House Feed Shallow - he puts a very regular “kick” on the retrieve - and it works. Is this way of fishing this particular lure any better than say winding it straight in? Mark’s specific way works for him, he has had bass to 10lbs+ on this lure fishing it like this, so I reckon it does!

Cormac over in Wexford is in love with the IMA Sasuke 120 (it catches him lots of bass!), a lure that I am sure many of you know and quite possibly own. When I got to watch a couple of Cormac’s demonstrations at the fishing show last weekend and then fish with him last Monday, the way he tends to fish the Sasuke 1200 reminded me so much of another very good Irish bass angler I know and used to fish with a bit. I have such a vivid memory of a particular session in some fairly lively sea conditions when I caught nothing and was walking back towards my car. This lad was fishing around a corner and I watched him fishing with his rod tip up and he was reeling a hard lure in at a much slower and deliberate speed than I would have tended to. I was surprised at how slowly he was reeling the lure in with the bouncy conditions, mainly because I would have thought you’d lost a lot of grip with the lure travelling at a slower speed, but then he went and landed a couple of bass and it has sat with me ever since. The lure? The IMA Sasuke 120.

I don’t know anything about the history of Japanese (sea) bass fishing, but I have always assumed that somebody into lure design over there at some point took a look at the bottlenose style plugs some of the US striped bass anglers have fished with for many years now and applied the thinking behind that style of lip on the lures to their own Japanese fishing. I don’t know if this happened by the way, indeed it could have been the other way round or nothing at all do with any of it, but whatever the case the Sasuke range of lures from IMA are all based around that slightly different style of lip. I have caught a number of bass on the Sasuke 140 because that was the first IMA Sasuke lure I ever got and it worked from literally the very first cast, and whilst I have fished with and caught plenty of fish on the smaller 120 size, it’s really interesting to have now come across two very good Irish bass anglers who independently to each other have both come across a bit of a different and highly effective way to fish with the IMA Sasuke 120 specifically.

I make no apologies for tending to whack various hard lures out and wind them in at a fairly fast speed I would guess, so I am utilising what the different lures can do and the depths at which they swim to then adapt to locations and conditions. I wouldn’t whack my beloved IMA Hound 125F Glide out over a really shallow reef because it is designed to swim a bit deeper, just as I wouldn’t clip on and fish the killer little IMA iBorn 98F in much rougher conditions where its shallow-swimming design would be knocked off balance by all the turbulence - and so on. You know the score I am sure, but as an aside I still remember getting very frustrated early on in my bass fishing addiction when I didn’t understand all this and I kept losing some expensive lures to snaggy reefs.

So I spent a fair part of last Monday watching how Cormac fishes one particular lure in such a specific way. By fishing with your rod tip up and utilising a somewhat slower retrieve you are of course causing said lure to swim that bit shallower than if you simply whacked it out and wound it in at a fairly fast speed - me! - and when I was watching Cormac’s IMA Sasuke 120 swimming in the calm waters of the trout fishery where the show was held, it was amazing how the roll on the Sasuke 120 was so exaggerated by fishing it like this. I accept that there are many ways to skin and cat and perhaps any of you who fish with the Sasuke 120 are already fishing it like this and I am the one who is behind the eightball here, but it would be somewhat daft of me to spend time with good bass angler and not watch how a bloke fishes with a specific hard lure he fishes with a lot. There’s a lot more to what he’s doing than what I am on about here, but you get the drift I am sure. Yes it’s got me thinking, yes, it’s got me digging out a couple of Sasuke 120 lures, and yes it’s got me looking at how I fish with a few specific lures and wondering if I am doing anything remotely different or unique to anybody else! I am going to play with a few hard lures and really slow them down to see what happens for starters. You all have a good weekend…………

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