Floating, sinking and suspending

While a hardbait is being retrieved, all three classes do much the same thing. The difference appears in the second the retrieve stops — and it is exactly that second that most takes are built on.

Floating

On a pause it slowly rises, and once the retrieve resumes the lip drives it back down again. A hardbait like this forgives a snag: stop the retrieve, and the lure floats up over the obstacle on its own.

Sinking

On a pause it goes down. This gives two things a floating one does not have: it can be cast further, being heavier, and it can be let down to the right depth before the retrieve begins. The price is snags: a pause over a sunken tree ends not with the lure floating up but with it hanging up.

Suspending

It stays right where it was stopped, and holds in mid-water for as long as you like. That is the whole point of the class: the lure can hang motionless right in front of a fish, neither rising nor sinking.

A suspending bait is tuned for a specific water

Neutral buoyancy means the lure's density matches the water's density, and water density changes with temperature and salinity. So the same model can slowly float up or slowly sink in different water, and that is not a fault in the lure.

What shifts the balance

Fluorocarbon sinks on its own and pulls the lure down, braided line does the opposite. A suspending bait is the most sensitive to this: changing the leader can turn it into a slow sinker.

Swapping the stock trebles for heavier ones shifts the lure toward sinking, for lighter ones toward floating. This shows most on a suspending bait, which is built as an exact balance to begin with: change the hooks and you easily end up with a different class without meaning to at all.

Your own copy is checked in the water

The class on the box describes the model, not the particular lure with the leader, snap and hooks fitted to it. Lower it in the water near the bank and watch whether it floats up, holds or sinks. This is the only check that accounts for your whole rig.

In current the pause works differently

A stopped lure in still water simply floats up or sinks, but in current it also gets carried along. A floating hardbait there rises not straight up but along a backward arc — the pause turns into a separate phase of the retrieve, not dead time.

How it is marked on the box

The class is written in letters next to the length and weight. It is a description of pause behaviour, not a rating of the lure: none of the three classes is better than the others by itself. The mark is read together with the working depth range — on its own neither of them gives even half the picture.