With a free day on my hands I went to check out a new pond.
One of the guys who fishes at my local lake had recommended it as a pike hot
spot but warned that it was a bit snaggy. Why is it that fishermen are prone to
extremes when it comes to the truth? The lake was a lot more than snaggy it was
at best a drowned forest where someone had dumped large amounts of scrap metal.
My loses were limited to a couple of jigs and an old balsa prototype that had
caught fish in other locations. Lucky I managed to land three replacements, a
Mepps spinner,an impossibly small crank bait and a Yo-zuri Crystsal Minnow
130f.
I left
after an hour or so, nobody else was catching fish and I wished I had brought a
little dingy to collect the other ten lures I had seen hanging in the branches
of partially submerged shrubs. Back at the local lake I hooked on the Yo-zuri
out of curiosity. I can only remember buying one hard bodied fishing lure in my
life and that was hand made from H+M lures, a thing of beauty that I packed
away for the move down from Scotland and that was the last I saw of it.
The Yo-zuri felt like it could do the business there seemed
nothing wasted in its design. It flew well though not to any greater distances
than I was used or with any more finesse
but I loved its pulsing wobble a thing I recognised from own pine minnows being
that they are a little longer than the balsa. Most of all I liked the way it tangled in the trace
when I threw the usual sloppy cast or
slapped it into the water, proof that no matter how good the lure or how long
the designer has worked on it still has to be tested on idiots.
Annoyingly I caught a small pike that saved the day from a
blank but part of me wished I had caught it on one of my own lures. Fighting
the darkness I slipped on my weight shifting Phox Minnow and threw it across the
lake, it felt like coming home.
