Back in the Philippines, when it was summer, almost everyone you know would be heading for the beach. I grew up in Cebu and there, almost everywhere is 30 minutes away from the water.
Imagine the surprise I got 5 years ago when I moved to Dubai, it wasn’t the heat can you believe, I was expecting that! (We are in the desert after all…)
What surprised me were the hundreds of lures in front of me at the shops in Deira! ‘WOW’ I thought; I’m in heaven!
You see… when I can’t fish I have to do something fishing related. The heat was getting unbearable and I was almost out of lures, so instead of ordering online a friend of mine told me to check out a few shops in Deira.
In that single summer afternoon I stumbled across all the shops that were selling fishing Items and since then, they have become some of my favourite lure shops, what a great find! My love affair with lures started a long time ago, mostly because I saw them in the fishing magazines I read and always found that they were attached to some pretty decent fish.
Almost automatically when I see lures my head starts to spin and my very healthy imagination kicks in. I thought to myself “Wow, if I have one of those things, I’m sure to catch some pretty mean fish;” I couldn’t however have been farther from the truth.
Like any sort of tool, lures work their best in the hands of those that are skilful in manipulating them; it is after all, just a tool…
The summers here have temperatures that are not too kind to fishermen, not even in the evenings. Only a few brave the summer heat; I’m sure they catch fish, but most of us enjoy what little comfort our air conditioners give us. That doesn’t mean to say that you have to stop fishing though.
Summer is usually the time when I would do repairs and maintenance on my gear, change the rusty or bent hooks on my lures, put some new line on the reels and store them away from sunlight. It is also one of my favourite times to stock up on some lures. So, in the summer months, I will be writing about tackle maintenance, hoarding your small army of trusty lures and other things that would get you prepared for the next winter fishing season. Lures come in many shapes, sizes and colours – so much that it would drive you insane, but as with most things, the more the merrier.
Nowadays it is not uncommon to find lures of different sizes in 100 million different colour combinations.
Lures are categorized in two types– hard bodied, and you guessed it soft-bodied lures. In this Article, we will touch up on some of my favourite hard-bodied lures.
Hard bodied lures are categorized into a few types as well but the most common ones we find readily available are classified into what we call “plugs.”
Back in the day, the first ones were whittled out of wood into the shape of a fish; these pieces were called “plugs,” the name stuck. Rapala does some of the most common plugs you find in all respectable tackle shops and fishing supply. Storm, Yo Zuri, Sebile, Duel, and Maria are popular brands. I find plugs awesome; some are constructed to float, (some float but because of the lip in front of it) some dive and wiggle, some are heavy and sink slowly, and some are designed to sink and be fished at the bottom or
deeper in the water column. There are even plugs designed to reach 50 plus feet on their own!
Plugs are puppets and you are the puppet master
Some plugs like the Zara Spook and Yo Zuri Hydro Pencil don’t have an action of their own so you have to manipulate or “work” as how we fondly call the process. Some plugs called “poppers” have cupped faces that make a huge popping and splashing sound when you jerk your rod tip, it’s supposed to simulate the sound of feeding fish (this encourages other feed to fish when they hear it). When worked properly, lures like the Spook and Hydro Pencil have a wide side-to-side wobble; its retrieve is probably the hardest to work but it is one of the most effective ways to catch fish.
A top water strike is the most spectacular sight you will ever see. I’ve had fish strike so close to where I was standing that the splash got me wet (I felt like I was going to die from a heart attack!).
There are videos online that show you how to work lures so I’m not going to discuss that here, but what you should know, however, is that speed plays a very crucial role. Some fish like the lures worked fast, while others prefer it worked slowly. There is almost no wrong way to work a plug, at times a fish even takes a static lure – it’s rare, but it can happen.
When you work lures, it’s important to vary the retrieve and find what the fish like. It’s easy to give up and say the fish aren’t biting; often times it’s just that you haven’t figured out what retrieve the fish want. The plug I choose depends on what fish I’m after. I’m not too hung up on colour as most people
are, what’s important to me is the lure’s built in action. This means that when I retrieve the lure with a straight retrieve, I like seeing a very active side-to-side wiggle, the wider the wiggle the better.
Lures with very tight wiggles are better for trolling (like Rapala plugs), for me at least. Lures like the Yo Zuri Crystal Minnow have a cult following all over the world. Anything that has a set of dentures that your dog would love would eat it, and in turn I have about 15 or more of them and for a good reason, you lose a lot!
It’s not just the size, it’s the manner of attack!
A few years ago, I saw a gentleman in Jumeira 1 casting a CD18. I sat on the rocks and watched him toil for about 1 hour until he gave up. A Rapala CD18, folks, is 7 inches (18cms). The fish that were biting were kingfish and barracuda of about 2-3kilos. Whist they are still hungry critters, something that big would still be a mouthful. Elephants love peanuts and some of the biggest marlin ever caught ate a small
lure.
On the same rock the guy stood on earlier, I hooked a good fish on the first cast with a 4-inch plug. He looked surprised.
There are plugs designed for casting and there are those, which are good for casting but better for trolling. Rapala, especially the older models, are light, so they are not my top choice for casting.
There are recent models, like the XRap, that are designed for casting. Yo Zuri and Duel Lures are mostly made for casting and are my preferred brand of plugs especially for subsurface fishing. Finally I have only one piece of advice left to give for lure selection: Pick the colour you like, and the shape you like, more than likely, that would be the lure that would always be chosen first and worked longer. The more it hits the water, the more chances it has of catching fish. Like shoes and bags (guys, you can make this an excuse) we need a lot of lures to cover a lot of situations. I have more than 50 of them (I honestly didn’t count) only a few don’t have tooth marks.
So many lures…so little time.
Till next tide change,
Kit
Published in May 2011
