TIM HARRISON’S CHOICE OF SOFT PLASTIC LURES

As a bass guide, I often get asked to name my favourite lures, and my answer is not always easily given. Not because I am a secretive soul, quite the opposite because I am always happy to offer help and advice. It is just that the answer is often complicated.

My initial answer will often be in the form of a question – soft or hard plastic lure?

I see the two types as differently as I see chalk and cheese. In the previous issue (556), I named my favourite hard plastic lures, so this time I’m revealing my top six soft plastics for use on a boat.

On a boat, soft plastics are a cheaper alternative to hard lures. Not a bad thing, as losing softies in snags feels a whole lot better than waving goodbye to £20-plus hard plastic lure that refuses to budge out of some unseen hazard down below.

I prefer soft plastic lures while on the drift in strong tide over rough broken ground. They will catch fish just as readily as hard plastics, but do so without the risk to your bank account. Better still, in the right hands and fished in the correct way, they can be just as effective as any livebait.

ESSENTIAL WEAPONS

Sometimes referred to as either soft plastics or even softies, these are essential weapons in your boat-based bass catching armoury. However, the type used varies almost totally from those that you might use from the shore.

On the shore, there is a growing trend to use stick bait-type softies that have almost no detectable movement when retrieved. They are fished super slow and gently bumped along the bottom, creating a very appealing natural type of movement. The softness of the lure allows almost imperceptible movement as it trundles and rolls across the seabed and gets influenced by tide and wave action.

It is impossible to achieve this subtlety of movement when fishing from a boat because the boat will be drifting. A drifting vessel impacts on a lure by introducing drag.

When retrieving moving or swimming lures, drag can be beneficial. The point that a lure starts to swim off its original course because the position of a drifting (and therefore moving) boat has changed, can be a killer moment in lure casting.

However, this is not the case when using stick baits as the speed induced by drag undermines all of the subtle action of the lure. It will come back through the water like a stick, and I am yet to have come across a party of bass feeding on sticks.

The only occasion that soft plastic stick baits can be fished reasonably well from a boat is when anchored. Here it is possible to cast at 45 degrees to the tide and to bounce the bait back along the bottom. However, I would suggest that the amount of disturbance involved in putting the anchor down reduces any likely benefit of fishing this method, particularly as there are far more effective boat-based soft plastic options to choose.

These come in two categories – paddletail soft plastics and natural imitation soft plastics. Here are my top six soft plastic bass lures to use from a boat…