Every so often the argument surfaces again, on a forum or a harbour wall: natural bait is cheating. Real anglers fool fish with feathers and plastic; bait anglers just leave food lying around and wait. We’ve heard versions of it aimed at everything from lugworm to squid, and lately — as urchin baits get more attention — at us. So here’s our answer to the “is natural bait cheating” question, written by people who fish both ways and keep coming back to the bait bucket.
Short version: no. Longer version: the argument gets skill exactly backwards, and it’s worth spelling out why.
Where the skill actually lives
The purist case assumes the skill of angling lives in the deception — that fooling a fish with an imitation is harder, and therefore worthier, than offering it something real. But watch what actually separates a good session from a blank, with either method, and the deception is a small slice of it.
The angler who catches is the one who read the ground right, picked the tide, found the boulder-and-kelp edge where the target species feeds, arrived when the feeding window opened, and presented something — hair-rigged plastic or banded urchin — in the right two square metres. We’ve written thousands of words on exactly that craft in our main guide, and almost none of them are about what’s on the hook. The urchin angler who did the scouting from charts, gathered bait on a spring low, and cracked a bait so the roe washed down-tide has exercised more fieldcraft before the first cast than the lure aisle can sell at any price.
If anything, natural bait raises the bar on one axis: you can’t buy it. The lure angler’s preparation can end at the till. Ours starts a fortnight out with a tide table.
Matching the hatch is the oldest idea in angling
There’s an irony the purist argument never quite faces. The most celebrated skill in lure and fly fishing — matching the hatch — is the discipline of making your offering resemble what the fish are actually eating, as closely as possible. Fly tyers spend winters imitating a specific mayfly at a specific stage of emergence. That’s the craft, and it’s a genuine one.
Fishing a real urchin over urchin ground is matching the hatch with the error bars removed. Wrasse and sheepshead crunch urchins every day of their lives; presenting one where they feed isn’t a shortcut around the imitative tradition, it’s the thing the imitative tradition is imitating. It seems strange to call the copy noble and the original a cheat.
Bait fishing’s observation-first culture
There’s also a cultural claim buried in the sneer — that lure fishing is active and thoughtful while bait fishing is passive: cast out, sit down, wait. Anyone who’s actually fished natural bait well knows the opposite is closer to the truth. Bait fishing done properly is observation-first. What’s on this shore? What’s being eaten, and at what stage of tide? Why did the bites stop at slack water? Turn over rocks, look in gullies, gather what lives there, and offer the fish what the shore itself suggested. That’s a naturalist’s discipline, and it’s the oldest continuous tradition in the sport. The sitting down is the last step, not the method.
Where the lure anglers have a point
An even-handed defence should concede the real advantages, and there are two we’d never argue against.
Mobility. A lure angler travels light and covers a mile of coast in a session, hitting 20 marks while we fish two. When fish are scattered and hunting, that mobility out-fishes any bait. We’ve been beaten by it often enough to respect it.
Catch and release. Lures, especially singles with the barb crushed, generally lend themselves to cleaner releases. Bait gets swallowed deeper more often; that’s just true, and a responsible bait angler manages it — bigger hooks, tighter lines, striking early, and keeping fish that are hooked badly rather than releasing them to die. If your fishing is strictly C&R, lures have a genuine ethical edge and we won’t pretend otherwise.
Neither point, though, is about skill or sport. They’re practical trade-offs, and they cut both ways: bait selects for the careful planner, lures for the energetic searcher. Different virtues, not a hierarchy.
The verdict from the harbour wall
“Cheating” implies a rule, and there’s no rule here — only fashions about which difficulties count as honourable. Lure purism decided that difficulty purchased in a shop counts and difficulty earned on a spring low doesn’t. We decline the premise.
Fish the way that absorbs you. If that’s a box of soft plastics and 10,000 casts, genuinely, good luck and we mean it. But when we band a fresh urchin onto a hook and drop it beside a kelp edge we found on a chart and confirmed on foot, we’re not cutting a corner. We’re fishing the whole game — habitat, tide, quarry, and bait — as one connected piece of knowledge. The urchin isn’t a cheat code. It’s the exam.