What bait, mate? by Gary Earl

I have found that the over the 30 years of writing fishing articles, we have really focused on what is in fashion at any given time.

At the moment, any fisherman will tell you it's soft plastics, but if you go back 10, 20 or 40 years it was all about a diving hardbody lure made from wood or some sort of plastic fitted with a bib. Then there were chrome and brass lures, machined, and used to jig and troll. They have been around since the 1950s and '60s, and are still being used today. They either had a kink in them to swim along or were dazzled up with 3-dimensional stickers to reflect the sun.

Then the new battle blades came along; they showed up about 10 years ago and gave you the option of a hole at the top end of their body to provide either a deep or shallow run.

The new way is to catch fish on poppers -- seeing a fish in the shallows and hoping it will rise to the occasion and snatch the popper from the surface in an explosive display.

Well that's great fishing in anyone's book and all these methods work very well, and we really do have to hand it to the lure craftsmen. Taking nothing from them, they have tricked up the fishing scenario for the future and are probably saving a lot of baitfish from being taken from our waterways. The old tricks of streamcraft used in rivers, estuaries and lakes are becoming lost in the game of fishing, which really is a shame.