What makes a good Sea fishing lure?
Discussing lures recently made me realise that there characteristics which are particularly useful for sea fishing from the shore but not all lures have them. Lures don't have to be perfect - people catch on all sorts of things - but finding a lure which are good in several regards might mean that it covers more conditions effectively and so you don't need as many lures & you don't need to change it as often (so your lure spends more time in the water attracting fish).
Useful characteristics include:
- "cast-ability", the ability to cast far & with out excessive tumbling & self-hooking (e.g. when the lures hooks catch the line or stick in the lures body, as my YoZuri Crystal minnow has started doing!:head). This could allow you to cover a significantly larger area with the same number of casts and help you get over weed, gunge, rocks and boulders.
- snag-avoidance (weedy/rocky areas - like where bass are often found). To reduce lure losses and gunged and fouled hooks.
- attraction - appearance & movement. For example, looking like normal prey, something good to eat or being easy to see/feel. Attracting fish from a larger surrounding area by appearance (bright flashing blade, light, illuminous, bright colour) and/or movement (vibrating spinner blade, jointed injured fish action, angler-imparted action - like jerkbaits, oscillating tails like artificial eels).
For ease of casting, having a fair amount of weight, 18g-60g / 0.5-2oz, seems like a good starting point. Some lures, including some large Rapala floating lures are incredibly light, sometimes 10g or less. Rubber eels usually need additional weight (e.g. a bored bullet/barrel 3-5 ft up line or small weight hidden inside). The moving weight systems used in some modern lures are also intended to improve casting by reducing tumbling and therefore tangling. Slimmer shapes and more dense construction could also help reduce wind-resistance.
For snag-avoidance, diving top-water
floating lures offer realistic action in the shallow waters often fished from the shore. Stopping such a lure allows it to float back to the surface & potentially over weed. Floating poppers stay on the surface and can often be used when even shallow divers are snagging weed. However, as mentioned above, some floating lures are quite light which can reduce casting distance (although I have some poppers that will cast as far as any lure).
Another approach is to use lures with
fewer hooks. Several modern lures & spinners use a single hook, often up-turned, sometimes shielded by a "skirt", to reduce snagging; some vintage Rapala spoons do likewise (...as the old adage says "ain't
nothing new under the sun"). These include some novel spinners, artifical eels (e.g. Eddystone & Delta) & new gel fish lures. Some are quite heavy and so can be cast & used to fish deeper, for example Bass bandits and many of the new & weighted gel fish lures.
For attraction, movement seems to be a winning strategy with Eddystone eels tails and Mepps-style bladed spinners being a proven fish attractors, that don't require good visibility (but it might help). Floating divers (like the popular jointed Rapala) seem to have a lower-key natural movement without too much angler induced effort. Watching videos of some US jerkbaits suggests anglers can impart very realistic movement into otherwise uninteresting lures. Poppers create commotion, like an injured or distressed fish gulping at the surface, intended to entice aggressive predators.
Colour is much debated but perhaps it is less critical than it might seem at first. It comes down to regional and personal preferences. For example
blue-silver &
grey-
silver are popular UK for the bass but hi-viz
yellow &
orange is reputed effective in a recent article on Portland fishing.
Chartreuse is another classic lure colour, surely anglers and interior designers are the only people to know about such colours
.
Red-head/white body seems very popular in tropical climates like SA (especially judging by the shark-eaten red-tipped white kayak image posted a while back!). Some people are very keen on the gold/bronze/
brown version of the Rapalas.
Black is currently enjoying some popularity, the idea being that it helps present a clear fish-shaped silhouette to predators. Some say fish see red as black too (due to filtering of red light by the sea and perhaps the way fish see?). Silver, grey-silver & blue-silver are my personal favourites at the moment, because they look like the baitfish I see swimming around (& because I and others have caught fish on them). Bright silver flashing is a well known attractor of many/most predators, some will reputedly even take a shiny unadorned hook. I've noticed that a couple of lures (a cheap glittery blue & white artificial eel & a premium Marie Angel Kiss top water lure) had, unadvertised, illuminous/phosphorescent/
"glow-in-the-dark" colouring on their bellies - which showed up glowing green in dim lighting (surprise!).
A possible downside to using realistic colours & patterns is that real fish have evolved with a fair amount of natural camoflage, so their tops are often dark, their sides reflective silver and their underside light coloured - making them harder to see! No doubt predators have had to evolve to deal with that. (They say human eye-sight has very good colour separation of greens -- one of the reasons for switching from red/orange to yellow-green as safety colours).
Shape is something that bothers me about some lures. Most of the poppers, especially the less expensive ones are short and fat. For large pelagic fish it might not matter. However, the bait fish I see while swimming the UK shore are long and slim; some are very long and slim (e.g. sandeels). However, Veals offer some "pencil" thin Diawa poppers which have a good reputation for catching. Articificial eels and weighted eels, like bass bandits seem targeted to fill this gap. Rapala offer a great looking long thin jointed lure, the
Saltwater Sliver, in
- unfortunately it is intended for trolling, it is expensive (I have seen them selling for £9-£17/$18-$34) but perhaps most importantly, it is fitted with a deep diving lip unsuitable for most shore fishing (
but... ). (Anybody had success using stubby lures?)
Although, I get the impression that some anglers (Mike Ladle springs to mind) would catch fish on a hook with a blade of thick grass doubled and larks-footed onto it (a simple native lure used by Amazonian tribesmen). Knowing where, how & when to go are probably more important.
