Learning to sew. (Needlefish and lure theories analysed:: Part 1 of 3)
OK, as I write this, maybe it isn’t the best time to ‘start’ needle-fishing but if you know the ropes, there isn’t really any off period, just times when it’s easier, and times when it’s tougher. As we head toward Christmas, many will have already hung up the lure rods in the mistaken belief that the season for lures is over. Those same people will be fishing again in earnest come Easter? Fish are ‘cold blooded’, they have a metabolism in tune with the water temperature. Right now, here, mid November 2016, the water is around 13C yet come Easter, likely to be 8 – 10C at best, if not colder, especially during Easters that are getting earlier and earlier. Yes, we have periods of sunshine that lure the angler out to fish but it’s way colder than right now and as such, I would advocate people to consider swinging their seasons or simply abandoning ‘seasons’ altogether. There hasn’t been a month in which I haven’t caught a bass, on lures in any year unless I haven’t gone fishing. If you know me, you’ll understand that isn’t something that happens a lot… LOL. You simply adapt expectations to time of year and, more importantly, water temperature, fish behaviours, bait availability and prevailing conditions. So, there is some motivation and of course, the further north you go, or south, the closer to the gulf stream you are etc, the more variance there will be in your so called ‘season’. I’d simply say ‘forget it’ and carry on. So, the 3rd proper part of these needlefish articles will be the hardest to write. I know exactly what I want to say and much of it will rely upon previous layers of knowledge hopefully gained by reading the first parts of said articles… What I want to cover in these articles, are the ‘parts of the whole’. This in itself will be difficult to achieve so I’ll have to be as generic as possible and make some ‘assumptions’. However, anyone following this stuff is going to have the skills to apply in context, what I am writing, to local situations and the tackle an individual carries and utilises.
No difference between these, hard needlefish, dry flies, wet flies, bait etc. Only the mindset is different in the way they ‘could be presented’. To a fish, they are all potential food until proven otherwise. OK, what do I mean by ‘parts of the whole’? We have covered needlefish basics, the lures, the weights and even touched on planing angles, swinging and drifting but, only a VERY basic level. Look, I’m really not telling you you need a science degree to make needlefish work but, why are needefish so damn effective? Why are they misunderstood, how then, can some people completely fail to get them to work and what is all this ’believe they work or they won’t rubbish’. Some people slay bass on needles, others don’t. Some believe in colours, some don’t… It’s a mess and it always takes someone to actually catch on a needlefish before they truly believe they work. They are a confidence lure like no other. I could take you out, night sea trout fishing, fishing a tiny (by comparison fly), and swing it, on a moonless night, through water 18” deep, so clear by day, with seemingly zero cover yet, at night, any ambient light is diminished to almost zero under the canopy of trees and you adopt an almost commando like approach to the cast. It needs to be ‘perfect’. You learn, the difference between heads, tails, pools, eddies and bars. You learn about flow, you know, or have witnessed, the incompressible nature of water as it is forced to speed up as it flows over these bars or is forced under a partially submerged fallen tree. A narrow channel and group of rocks focuses this flow even further. You see, as a game angler, dry fly, wet fly, salmon angler, sea trout angler by day, or night on natural flowing waters, you either learn this stuff, or you fail. Why then, do anglers not take these very logical and fundamental steps to understand the environment when it comes to the sea.
If you look at the image, this is typical of a shallow gully where bass run though and hold during both ebb and flood tides. However, it’s not straight forward to cast and retrieve, nor cast and swing in the so called traditional ways. So we have to work outside of the mainstream methods. We’ll look more closely at what can be done later in the articles. The sea, as a general rule, ebbs and flows with lateral currents in places far in excess of some of the worlds fastest, nastiest river systems. The world of the sea is one of mobility, one where we can, via science and comparison or cross over, piece together small sections of coastline and open it’s secrets. Trust me, the bass know why. This latter immutable factor is why some places are always better than others on a level playing field. People often believe, the waters around them do not flow and sometimes it is subtle, but it all moves. Surf beaches, the areas between shore and offshore rocks and islands, over bars, channels and cuts. You’ve just got to find it. This is basically water craft. You have no control over it, you simply cannot change it without mass human intervention like dams, overfishing, mass extinction or some other factor that we shouldn’t apply. But you can learn to interact with it and use the myriad of keys available to unlock the doorways that are are almost ‘circle of mirrors’ in complexity. So instead, immerse yourself in it, become a part of it, feel it, learn it, use it.
Note how, in the above image, the cast is being made along the face of the incoming waves and swell. This is because the water is pulling hard laterally as well and, the face of waves run UP and unbroken waves run in an orbital fashion. I said I’d keep this simple and short. However, writing thus far, I can already see that will not be easy or indeed, possible without highlighting other related ideas and concepts. All the above will have to be learned but, each segment deserves a volume to itself. That is the focus of this (group) of article’s, simply to get you all started, not teach you all to suck eggs. Much of this info is hidden in books more akin to the subject of natural sciences and not angling. Stuff like reading beaches and knowing faces of waves travel UP are rarely covered in angling books. Seek out and digest the knowledge. The human interaction. How do we influence the lure, how do ‘we’, make a difference in whether or not, a bass takes a lure? We have human intervention and further to that, mechanical intervention and natural physical interventions such as tides, weather and seasons. All are intertwined to such a degree, many choose to cover the whole subject as one. This, when you gain that ‘instinctive drive and understanding’ is fine. A a newbie or an improver, a mistake and sometimes of epic proportion. We, as the human, the angler, influence the lure in ways people never consider. One of which is of course, where you cast said lure. That latter fact once more opens up a myriad of possibilities as to how on should ‘work’ a lure or ‘not’ in such a place and other mundane stuff like ‘why’ we are
there, what lure we choose, how far and where to cast it once at the venue. This is a minefield of skills that many don’t even realise they have, yet alone need but, I will tell you now, in my experience, most anglers have, blindfold off, residual, inherited, almost sixth sense skills that can mean the difference between catching, and simply fishing in a nice scenic area. The use of phrases like ‘This looks Shirley” is simply not scientific, nor repeatable if you have zero basis to make those statements or phrases of ‘identification’ mean anything. Most of these instinctive skills would tell you, should you bother to ‘allow the switch to flip’ on the ‘hunter inside’ that X scenario requires Y skill set and Z strategy. You are your own best friend when it comes to advice but recent decades have switched off the neurons to these deeply hidden (in many) parts of the brain that should you choose to go with gut feeling and instinct, you’d likely catch more before we even came to taking skilled outside advice. I know this sounds crazy but humans are animals, we learn, we evolve, or we don’t. People laugh when older people sometimes struggle with computers and modern tech yet, it’s simply a new set of skills. It doesn’t make the old ones invalid. Most people buy their food now, they don’t hunt it. In some circles, to suggest you might eat your catch is baulked at but there was a time, survival depended upon the knowledge and the skills. Info was passed down first hand, rarely written down and yet, we as a species, became the apex predator ‘and’ farmers. We now rely on new and different information media to instruct us in the way of things and bass lure fishing is no different. Needlefish fishing isn’t new, it’s been there, hidden in plain sight for decades and it seems today, it almost always takes a certain amount of ridicule and bravery to break conventions to try stuff that may or may not work for bass in ‘our seas’. As we determined in previous articles, the needlefish is simple, the lure itself is so simple, it defies convention. Yet, give this lure to the uneducated and chances are, it won’t be used as intended. People tend to fish lures, regardless of what they are, to convention. I saw many fishing needlefish ‘Walk The Dog’ style in the early years and no, nothing wrong with that, it works of course yet, approach those people and suggest they aren’t doing things as well as, or as the lure was intended to be fished and you are more often than not, met with a wall of flak.
This will be your hardest hurdle. Learning to fish a lure that ‘interacts’ with the sea is not going to be easy when all your lure fishing life, a lure has been cast away from the rod tip and wound back, at various speeds and depths, back to it. I’m generally trying to set you all up for a few (quite a few) concepts actually that do not follow convention and do not need too. They never needed too.
As we move along we’ll look at the behaviour of the bass and the food sources they rely upon. We’ll graze over basic hydrodynamic principles that may leave your head in pieces and yet, there is no escaping the facts (Most are immutable). Once you’ve opened Pandora's box, you will have seen inside. You cannot opt to turn back time and not see it. What you choose to do afterwards, is what will determine your lure fishing path. In no way am I suggesting all other ways are wrong. There are no bad lures, all catch fish at some point but consistency is something else altogether. Natural physical world interventions. Far more an influence than people imagine and especially with so called ‘retrieved lures’. The idea that fish in general spend their lives chasing baitfish is a myth. It does happen in some parts of our blue ball of course but we are addressing so called ‘cold-water species’ here and in the British Islands our temperature range is most certainly, cold water. My local temp range is around 7C to 19C recorded at the harbour by the data collectors but, it’s simply not that easy. We get local variance that can see shallower areas reach 22 or 23C. However, in a needlefish context, this matters not when we are building lures here for our fish and seas and that is also true of buying in needlefish lures from the NE USA where temps are ‘similar’. The designed behaviours of a NE USA needlefish won’t deviate that much when used in our waters. This is not true of Eastern Japanese or East Asian manufactured lures. Many are designed for the freshwater market anyway and, those designed for salt are tested not in our seas, but in theirs. Makes sense right? It does until you compare sea temps here, and sea temps there. Tokyo Bay as of Fri Nov 18th is 21.1C St Helier Jersey is 13C. In fact, Tokyo peaks somewhere around 26C in the summer as opposed to our 18 or 19C. In the winter, we experience 6’s and 7 degree ranges whilst those Japanese seas are like a minimum of 14C. Why does this stuff matter? Does it affect the lure fishing? Well, yes and no. For a start you can throw away all those depth and running charts for these lures. The way water density and temperature work means non of those lures will work as designed in home waters. They still work so does it matter? That’s a question for you to decide but 1C makes a difference in a neutral lure either sinking, or floating so you tell me. If you can present, a sinking stick in a way that represents something alive in this medium of flowing saltwater and fool something else, alive into taking it as food, how cool is that. Getting something to free animate, whilst tethered, is NOT easy yet, the rewards for achieving this utopian ideal can be off the scale. There are indeed, a number of ways to present a needlefish, a senko, a sluggo, an xlayer, a dolive stick… the bass care about the profile, the length and the way it should behave in the water where the lure is being presented. You can use the waters, flowing perceptively or not, to present this lure. Cast and wind? Why not cast and wait a while? Why not, as would happen in flows, let the lure go with it? Why not swing the lure over, or ‘along’, yes, along is possible using either the rod, the backwind on your reel or both. The minute that line tightens, you introduce drag. Sometimes you might want drag, most times I’ve caught bigger bass, there has been little in the way of drag. Think OTD or ‘On The Drop’, a most natural manner in which a lure falls through the water and then think, why can’t a lure, fall along a current, rise UP the face of a wave, cycle in the orbit of a wave. Of course they can. The big issue is the skills required and the resolve required to let it happen. Most never do.
Imagine a senko, hooked up on a single. Note how most times on the hit and capture, the senko, or sluggo or whatever is bent UP and around the bend of the hook. The fish INHALE the lures via negative vortex. This is another immutable fact, the bass just feed like this. In fact, you should look at all this stuff as pre-requisite knowledge. How do bass swim? Find out, most fish use the same mechanisms to move or hold in water. Find out how and why, it’ll expand your knowledge. Don’t simply listen to me, or anyone else and accept it, challenge it and LEARN. In the end, during a period now where bass fishing in general has never likely been any harder, any information you have that holds up has to be a major advantage. This holy grail of ‘free animation’ may not be practical, nor achievable in real world conditions but, the closer to get to it, trust me, the more you open doors. Achieving that semblance of control whilst retaining bite detection will result in more bass, the end.
Simply drifted, not swung under tension, dead drifted and allowed to travel with the water, this unweighted lure fooled yet another bass as it has done so many times before. Continued in part 2 where we will look more at ‘free animation and sectional swings and drifts’ – Keith --------------------------------------------------------------------------->>>