SEA ANGLER
GILBEY’S GUIDE TO
Henry Gilbey explains why ultra-shallow diving hard lures are the most useful family of bass fishing lures and picks his top eight to try this season
I wish I could take you all to the first proper, shallow reefy mark where I began to cut my teeth on lure fishing for bass; it would perfectly illustrate all that I am going to talk about here. Thanks to a very kind, and incredibly skillful, UK angler who was living in south east Ireland and invited me over for some fishing, I soon fell into a complete lure fishing addiction! I would love to show you where this lad and I first started fishing together because the whole location was full of such valuable lessons which only became fully apparent to me as I started slowly getting to grips with fishing lures for bass.
One of the things I quickly learnt was that on a typical bass mark – for most anglers I think I can assume will more than likely be shallow, reefy or at least broken ground – there were in fact a number of sections of the mark where I couldn’t actually fish. It looked like I wanted to fish these spots as I started to learn about where bass tended to be, but the simple fact was that I didn’t know enough about bass lures yet, and as such I didn’t have any lures which would swim shallow enough to enable me to cover more of the shallow ground and not keep snagging up and costing me a fortune.
I don’t mind admitting that there was a point where I nearly walked away from bass lure fishing because I was losing too many expensive hard lures. It wasn’t the fault of the lures I might add, rather it was my lack of knowledge and not understanding enough about swimming-depths and what certain lures are designed to do or not do. Things have come on a lot with modern lure fishing, but even back then there was a fairly extensive family of hard lures which were designed to cover the sort of ground I was learning to avoid because of expensive lure losses. I just didn’t know this yet.
Let’s call these lures ‘ultra-shallow divers’, or perhaps ‘shallow runners’ or something like that. When I started really getting into lure fishing for bass I ended up almost stumbling across these types of lures as a few forward-thinking UK importers started bringing them into the country. Back then it was mostly Japanese (sea) bass lures which were designed to fish how we needed.
I remember that first IMA Komomo SF-125 lure I bought in the cotton candy colour so well, because it hammered bass for me in parts of these marks I couldn’t previously fish properly. Things are very different now with far more tackle companies from all over the place getting involved with lures like these, but for the most part the ideas originate from Japan and not somewhere like the USA where, in fact, there isn’t much call for
