To strike or not to strike, that is the question
Do you suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or take arms against a sea of troubles? If only Hamlet was a bass angler
Ican remember it like it was only yesterday, and not with any sense of pride, I might add. A few of us were on an early-season bass fishing trip to Ireland, and although the middle of May might not be considered the best time of the year to head over there, every year is different and you can sometimes do really well.
We were on a very shallow and extensive reef mark for high water and I decided that now was the time to try a surface lure and see if I could encourage a fish or two to come up and take a lure off the top.
As I clipped on an IMA Salt Skimmer surface lure, one of my mates looked at me a little quizzically and uttered something like: “Do you really think the bass will come to the surface at this time of year?”
That made me even more motivated to see if something might happen. While I tend to find that, for some reason, warmer water encourages bass to hit surface lures that bit more, I subscribe to the ‘nothing ventured, nothing gained’ school of thought.
I launched my Skimmer and was willing something to happen as I walked it across the top. Firstly because it had been a bad winter of weather and I was keen to get among the bass again, and secondly because I was quite keen to land a bass off the top and be able to turn to my friend with a smug grin on my face and have a giggle at his expense.
Then it did actually happen. I can recall the entire sequence in my head because it still makes me cringe with how badly I messed up. I am not saying it was a particularly big bass, rather that I want to talk to you about striking when lure fishing and the various issues surrounding when and perhaps when not to do it, as was the case here.
I saw the swirl from a bass appear right next to my Skimmer and almost the split second later there I was sweeping my lure rod right back in a great big whooshing sound as I struck into nothing but fresh air. The bass was probably wondering where the hell its food just went. My head was hung in shame and my friend was having a giggle at my ineptitude. When, or indeed should, we strike when we feel a hit from a fish or see serious interest as I did on my surface lure that slightly embarrassing May morning?
FISHING BLIND
What I have found so fascinating about lure fishing for bass is how more varied this part of our sport is than I could ever have imagined. Let’s start off by looking at what we can safely class as the most typical way we might go
about casting sub-surface lures and winding them in on a straight retrieve.
Think about whacking out a hard lure, such as the IMA Hound 125F Glide, or perhaps a soft plastic such as the Savage Gear Sandeel, which is a soft lure body sitting on a relatively heavy jig head. While these lures can be fished in different ways, a lot of the time we are winding them straight in and hoping that a bass might jump on them.
When should you strike if you suddenly feel a bass on the end? Most of us are going do this when everything goes solid and something unseen thumps at the end of our line, but I’ll break this down a bit more.
Imagine you are winding in a lure and a bass might grab it. As much as braid doesn’t stretch, by the time you feel it all go solid, the fish is either hooked or hasn’t hit the lure quite right, knows something is wrong, and turns away as quickly as possible.
I’m not saying don’t sweep the rod back in some kind of strike. Rather, that on a straight retrieve I believe you have either unknowingly hooked the fish or not before you actually go to strike. I think a strike in this situation is a good way of trying to make sure the fish is hooked, combined with getting your rod in a good position to fight the fish.
Let us return to my utter failure with that surface lure in Ireland. With surface fishing being such a visual thing, it’s even easier to miss a hit from a bass. When there is a commotion around your lure then you’d think it correct to strike at the fish, but I would argue against this. When I am doing my guiding in Ireland and talking a client through a take off the top, I usually say you are better off closing your eyes to help control your excitement. If you can’t see the swirls, you can’t strike and potentially miss the fish.
What I really mean here is wait for your rod tip to slam over before striking. If you know this style of bass fishing, then I am sure you will have experienced a bass slashing and swirling multiple times at a surface lure. Think about how many fish you would have missed if you struck at the first sign of a bass. Sometimes a bass comes up and inhales your surface lure in a single movement, which is ideal. But still I want to control myself and wait for the rod tip to slam over before setting the hooks.
PLASTIC TROUBLES
Soft plastic lures are the big thing in bass fishing and here I think the art of striking becomes ever more important and also potentially troublesome. Winding in your hard lure and feeling like you have hit a brick wall is easy compared to deftly twitching something like an OSP DoLive Stick rigged weedless and weightless. Here you often need to really control yourself in order to set the hooks and, hopefully, land the fish.
What I hope for is that my lure is engulfed by a fish in one swoop, and my rod tip bangs over. I couldn’t really miss that bass if I tried because hardwired into my fishing DNA is an almost automatic movement to sweep the rod back when a fish bangs it right over.
What about those takes you need to almost work on to hook the fish? This happens a lot when using soft plastics – from twitching a DoLive Stick around to bumping something like a Fiiish Black Minnow down a decent run of current at the mouth of an estuary. Anybody can hit a bass when it slams the rod
tip over, but, while there’s never any guarantee we will land those fish, the chances are that the hook is almost set before you even strike.
The time when we really need to apply an extra bit of skill and plenty of self-control is when a bass knocks your lure before it properly commits. I wonder if sometimes these magnificent fish are slashing at a lure with a gill plate to stun it before turning around to mop it up.
For instance, have you ever felt a sharp, short bang on your rod tip that you know isn’t the time to strike? How hard is it not to when you feel it? If you do strike then you miss the fish. If you can just hang on and slow down the lure a touch, nine times out of ten you will get a proper hit on your rod tip that is unmissable. I believe this is the bass coming back to nail its stunned prey. Strike now! Of course, this is hard to do. That split second of self-control comes with experience.
Missing an occasional fish, especially during tough sessions, is a good way to get us thinking about our fishing and promising to do better next time. Deciding what is a bang on the rod tip rather than the need to react immediately is not always easy. Even the best anglers miss fish. How good is it though when you sweep your rod back and a split second later you feel that unmistakable thump from a fish? ■