Hi, I'm Vince Duller of Mr. Twister.
We want you to be more comfortable with soft plastic lures.
We've invited four experts to share their secrets with you.
Roger Moore will show you how to catch more bass and panfish.
Bud Reiser will share his secrets with you on walleye.
Jim Zumbo on trout.
And Stu Tinney on stripers.
If you haven't used soft plastic lures, this film will introduce them to you.
If you are using soft plastic lures, our experts will show you how to use them more effectively.
We think this film will be quite interesting.
We hope that this enhances your fishing pleasure.
Enjoy.
When your heart beats for the great outdoors, see your Chevy dealer, where you'll find over 90 different ways to enjoy it all.
Welcome to the Sportsman's Workshop, brought to you by the heartbeat of America, today's Chevy truck.
Well, look who woke up.
Good morning.
Yeah, I was dreaming about catching stripers on soft plastic lures.
You want to tell me how to do that, buddy?
No, I ain't going to tell you.
Come on, Stu.
I won't let you dream about it.
You know, if there's one lure that's more adaptable to any kind of fishing, it's got to be the leadhead jig.
You can do more with a leadhead jig, you can fish, I guess, more different kinds of waves with a leadhead jig than you can any other bait.
The adaptability is fantastic, and one thing that makes it so flexible is the availability of plastic trailers.
It's probably the one bait that catches more stripers than any other bait, and if anybody asked me about my favorite, it would have to be a leadhead jig.
And now that twister makes that super plastic stuff, and gosh, the kind of plastic that we use, this one, is simply a tail that makes the bait swim a little bit.
There's a little grub that makes the bait drop a little slower, and they come in all kinds of different colors, so for my money, you can't beat that kind of a combination.
Super bait. Murder on stripers.
How important is size when you're striper fishing?
I guess if there are three important factors like size, color, and weight, size would be for sure first or second.
Size is so important. We used to hear, we grew up learning that you want to catch a big fish, you use a big bait, and that's not totally accurate.
I've got a quarter ounce leadhead jig now, and I've caught loads of fish over 30 pounds on a bait of that size,
because there are times in the year when it's necessary to use a small bait, and I'm sure it's the same with bass fishing, trout fishing, walleye fishing.
But the way I do it, and this may not be totally accurate, but I found a little method, you know, when you get those little things in your head and they work.
I like to get to a place where I'm going to fish about an hour and a half or two hours before it gets light.
All the places where we go, they've either got ramps or they've got a dock or something, or you go over a bridge as you approach the lake,
and there's always these lights that are on all night long.
And I like to sneak up in one of those areas and kind of just peek into that little circle of light.
And boy, the lake will give you more secrets than no matter what you do.
I've seen guys go out fishing and just nothing more because they're just using the wrong size bait.
When you look in that lake before it gets daylight, you'll see a couple of large predator fish kind of circling around,
and you'll see two or three size things running through the light.
But what you really get to see is the average size of what the fish in that impoundment are seeing every single day at that particular time of the year.
So using a great big bait in the spring is important.
But when you get on closer into the summer where the shad have reproduced and there's a little bit of bait around,
and you throw those fish on fools, they live in that environment.
What about your trailer? Do you use a trailer?
Yeah, that's one of the tricks. I've got one right here, that's in here.
I've got a bait maybe an inch long, but if what I saw in the light was three or four inches long,
I can make that three or four inches long.
And I haven't done a darn thing, you know we were talking about the jig, it's so versatile.
You can change the descent, the weight, the presentation, the amount of distance you can cast it,
you can use them in tandem, you can use it in tandem behind another bait.
The application is so great, but size is important because no matter what you do, using the wrong size, you can't fool that fish.
What sizes do you prefer for big strikers?
Is that what you'd like or what's your...
A big striper at the right time of the year will hit any range.
He'll hit a quarter ounce bait in the late spring and early summer,
he'll hit a half ounce, seven inch bait in the spring and in the fall.
Sometimes we have to use a sixteenth ounce bait in the dead of winter when they're really, really not doing much feeding at all.
This is really my favorite bait, it's the twister tail.
I've broken that one down a little bit because it's a quarter ounce twister jig and it doesn't have any color.
A lot of people ask me about color, sometimes no color is the best color, but the bait now is about five inches long.
And there's a certain time of the year after the fish have done their spawning rig,
they come back down and they get down on the bottom.
They kind of squinch their body around to tighten up that loose flesh.
And they'll eat crawfish, that's the one time of the year when they'll kind of diversify their diet.
So we want to creep a bait along the bottom where they are, where they can see it,
and a quarter ounce bait on a really, you know, fillet.
That probably would take training.
A lot of bass fishermen would be amazed at the light tackle, that's only six pound test line.
But when you're talking in terms of catching a big fish, it's not necessarily the size of the bait.
It's putting the bait where the fish can see it and putting the right bait.
Of course, you know, later on in the summertime, I use exactly that same bait that you just showed me.
Using that great big ounce, ounce and a half bait.
And sometimes when we need to fool the fish, we'll even give him a second choice.
We'll just use that twister on a plain old hook.
And nine times out of ten when we're using a rig like this, the fish will hit that one rather than hit this one.
And there are so many applications for using this kind of a rig.
Sometimes, and in Texas particularly, it's really popular to take a bomber, a diving bait,
and off of the tail of that bait to drop one of those or even to drop a jig with a twister trailer on it.
Is that a trolling rig?
Well yeah, this is adaptable for trolling, but I like to use a big rod like this when the fish are on the surface in the fall.
Once you get that bait down there, for me for instance, I like fluorescent colors a lot.
Chartreuse, fluorescent orange. How important is color when it comes to stripers?
Color really isn't as important as you might think per se.
Red, green, orange as colors. But the spectrum, that's really important.
As you look in a watery situation, some water is what I like to call denser than other waters.
Some water is really clear, like you get up into the mountain and the lake and the water is really clear.
When the water is really clear, and I'm not a scientist, but I've got a lot of biologists, friends,
and their stories vary about the optical view that a fish has, and we know that it's the least of his senses.
But I've always known stripers to be visual feeders.
And I've always had the best luck when I was able to get the bait closest to them so they could see it.
And I've always felt, and I guess our success ratio proves it out, that if you give them a color that they can see when the water is really clear,
I am almost strictly white.
Sometimes I'll use chartreuse. Some of the lakes down in the south have high nitrate and phosphates,
and they've got some green algae on the rocks, and there's some little kind of green tint to the water, so I'll use the chartreuse.
And I've always felt if I can see the bait four or five feet down, then the fish can see it.
And if I can get it that close to him, then he's going to bite it.
Now, sometimes we get into a situation where the green and the white won't work, and I wonder about it.
And then I'll start thinking like I should think and take a look at the water, and the water is not quite as clear.
It's a little murkier, so I need to use a color that's a little brighter like the fluorescent colors.
Yeah, the fluorescent reds work thin, and yellow, which isn't really a fluorescent color, but yellow seems to be the dynamite color that
when nothing else works, yellow will seem to do the trick in really dense water.
And the biggest problem we have is when the water is muddy, we can't catch strikers at all.
They just don't seem to be able to see the bait no matter what.
We've tried all the fluorescent colors, and it just doesn't seem to work.
The water is really muddy, where when I put a bait in the water and I can't see it more than a foot, then the striper doesn't see it.
No matter how slow you present it.
No matter how slow we present it, we just can't catch fish in muddy water.
We can hardly find them. They seem to move out.
But when we get on the edge of a mud line, when the mud is beginning to come down the lake and we can get on the edge of a mud line,
then we use those greens and yellows, and we catch a lot of fish on them.
But if we throw the bait inside the mud line, we can't see anything.
I think we all suffer from murky water.
Trout, I don't know anyone who gets hurt more than a trout fisherman when the water gets muddy.
I've hurt bass fishermen. A lot of my bass fishermen love that murky water and they'd love to do that.
If you're a bass fisherman, probably it's accepted that the plastic worm is the best day in, day out bass bait that we have.
Largemouth, smallmouth, Kentucky spotted bass, and they'll catch other species as well.
But I think that the bass fisherman today better be pretty good with a plastic worm or he's not going to be successful.
We talk about a Texas rig, and right here is a Texas rig.
This is a slip sinker. You can see it slides back and forth on the line with a worm hook.
And you take the plastic worm. I want to show you something that has really changed in today's fishing.
You take the worm hook, insert it in the top of the worm and go in about a half an inch and come right out the side of the worm.
Slide the hook through the worm all the way up to the eye.
Turn it over, come over the eye of the hook a little bit so the knot is buried.
Then you take the hook and insert it back into the worm to make it weedless.
The point of the hook is not sticking out.
This is the way it's made to be fished.
On the bottom, very slowly, when you come over a brush or something, here's what happens.
Your slip sinker will slide away.
I personally don't like that sliding sinker on my line.
Let me show you what Mr. Twister has now with their keeper concept.
For the man who is bass fishing with a worm and doesn't want to take all the time and effort to go through this process,
the keeper hook is totally new.
All you do is take your plastic worm, take the shaft of this keeper hook, which already has the lead on the hook,
shove the shaft of that keeper hook right into the worm.
Take the worm, put the hook in it just like we did the other one,
and we have a perfect Texas rig worm with the weight so it doesn't slide away.
When you're fishing with this bait, it falls together as one unit.
When you're fishing in brush, you want it to come up over and fall back straight down.
You don't want it up here where the weight slides away from it.
You want to keep this compact lure that you're fishing for your bass.
Keep it all together.
Fish it extremely slow, and a plastic worm is the one bass bait that we fish with a slack line.
And I guess maybe the best tip I could give you is that when you feel a strike with a plastic worm, don't set the hook.
It's one of the toughest things there is to show someone because you think,
well, in the first place, I'm fishing with an artificial lure, and the fish won't hold on to it.
He's going to spit it out as soon as he bites it.
That's not true.
He doesn't feel the point of the hook.
The worm is very soft, feels very familiar with very much like a normal food that he feeds on.
Therefore, what you need to do when you feel that little peck, you're sliding that worm along the bottom.
When you feel that little peck, drop your rod tip, take up about two turns of the reel handle, and set the hook hard.
Remember now, you have to set the hook hard enough to pull the hook through the worm and into the fish's jaw.
Another little advantage of this keeper hook, it doesn't seem to destroy the worm as fast as your regular Texas rig.
After you've caught that fish, chances are you can slide the hook right back into the worm and catch another fish on it.
You can catch four or five fish sometimes on a plastic worm.
Just remember that basically the best colors for a plastic worm probably are purple, black, red, and blue.
The red and the blue colors are basically your clear water colors.
Purple and black for your off-color water, black especially in murky water.
But the purple worm, if you're only going to buy one, was probably the one you should put in your tackle box because it'll work pretty good in all water in the United States.
Worm length, probably the best length overall, is a six inch worm.
Weight and hook size, probably a two-aught or a three-aught hook, and probably an eighth ounce to a three sixteenth ounce weight.
The keeper hook comes in all those sizes and hook ranges.
And another thing, I prefer the curly tail worm.
The twister phenom worm was, well it was the first.
It was the very first curly tail worm in the United States market, and I think it still has the best swimming action.
It's the one I fish with, it's the one I catch all my fish on, and I'll give you another little tip.
When you're fishing with a spinner bait, and I think I have one here someplace, I believe it's in my tackle box here.
Okay, here we go. We have a spinner bait here.
And basically a spinner bait is something that has a spinner blade on it and a hook behind it with some type of a rubber skirt.
Some things to remember though, with that spinner bait, is that it's supposed to be fished rather fast.
As the fish move into the shallow water in preparation for spawn, they become aggressive.
They will look for a lot of food, they need a lot of food to carry them through the spawn because they don't feed much during the spawning period.
So a spinner bait is relatively weedless, it can cover a lot of water, and it just so happens that my favorite colors happen to be a white and a chartreuse.
I think either one of those two colors are equally good.
I guess they say if you want to use any kind of a rule of thumb, you should use the chartreuse color in the murky water or off color, and use the white spinner bait in your clear water.
There are just a lot of variations of spinner baits from willow leaf blade, which we have here, to the blade that's more rounded, Colorado blade.
I think that's pretty much a matter of personal choice, which blade you choose.
A particular spinner bait I especially like because it has incorporated some of the features of the keeper hook right into this bait so it'll even be more weedless.
And if you'll notice, under the rubber skirt, we have a keeper hook.
Now we can take the twister curly tail, and a curly tail attractor on a spinner bait, in my estimation, if fishing is slow, increases the fishability of a bait probably 100%.
I don't think hardly an attractor like this, a curly tail trailer, would hardly ever hurt you.
I don't think it'll ever turn a fish off, and I think there's a lot of times when it entices that strike that you wouldn't otherwise get.
So let's make this spinner bait now so it's completely weedless.
We'll take this chartreuse curly tail, trying to keep the rubber out of the way here so we can see it, and we'll put it down over the spike of that hook.
Now, take the tail, and here's something that's important.
While this is laying here, if you can get it on the camera, there we go.
While that tail is laying there like that, you'll notice the hook is in the upward position, and that's the same way you want your trailer to be, in the up position.
The water flowing by with the tail in this position opens the tail up and gives it a more natural swimming action to me than if the tail were turned in the downward position.
It's simple to do this with this keeper hook. All you have to do is rotate the plastic on the shaft until the tail of the curly tail lays in the same up position as the hook does.
After you get it there, see if I can do it here with it laying in my hand, take the point of the hook, stick it in the worm until the barb is in the worm.
I may not have that. Let me try it a little bit this way.
Take the point of that hook and pull it up into that worm, maybe almost until it's clear through. You can see I have it clear through the worm now.
Back it up until it just barely is in the worm like that. You can't feel the point.
Now you have a completely weedless spinnerbait with a curly tail swimming out behind it.
Extremely effective bass lure in the spring.
Another lure that we use in bass fishing with soft plastic that's extremely effective, primarily in a farm pond or a small impoundment but it will still work in your major reservoirs, is a plastic frog.
This is a hog frog. You can see the legs are very flexible and in the water they swim. The curly action makes them swim just like a frog leg.
Take a regular plastic worm hook, insert it right in the nose, pull it in about a half an inch, come out through the bottom of the frog and slide the hook all the way up to the eye.
Then turn it around, cover the eye with the frog and insert the hook between his legs just so the barb is buried.
That's completely weedless. Now just throw that out along the bank and twitch it along the top just like a frog. Short twitches along the top and hold on.
This is an extremely effective bait night because you can work it slow, you can work it on the top and anytime you're around a pond or any type of an impoundment that has little frogs around the bank, this is a good bait and you can fish it on heavy line, you can fish it on light line.
But just get out there and throw it along the bank. Remember these frogs are going to be found around the bank so don't try to fish it clear out in the middle and don't fish it real fast.
Roger, that's all well and good for bass but how about panfish? How about crappies, bluegills and the like? What do you like best for them?
You know you use a different technique, you use lighter line, you use lighter tackle and you use smaller lures. A lot of times when you're fishing for these fish you'll end up catching a bass.
But here again we're looking at some of the same type of lures that we've been talking about, only smaller. The same type of soft plastic lures.
The little Cane and Dad lures here you see, I'm going to take this off the package and take it out.
Chartreuse color is a very good bluegill color in the spring, especially if you have water that is just a little bit murky. You can see that's just a tiny little crawfish.
Throw that lure out and let it hesitate just a minute. As it works down they'll follow it. Normally when you twitch that lure the first or second time they'll hit it.
Bluegill usually hits a lure really hard. The kids love to catch bluegill because you don't have trouble telling when you've got a bite.
Crappie on the other hand are just totally different. Hardly ever hit a lure very hard.
Find the depth of those fish, they will stratify. And as they move up, as the water warms up, they move into the shallows.
And little white leadhead jigs, little white curly tails, and I think I've got a couple of little white curly tails in here somewhere, right here.
A superb crappie bait in the springtime. Put this on four or six pound test monofilament and throw it into the shallow water and retrieve it very slow.
You don't even need to use a jigging retrieve for a crappie. Just throw it out there and retrieve it with a steady retrieve, just enough to hold it off the bottom.
Occasionally you will catch a crappie on a crankbait or some other type of a bait. I've even caught them on a topwater bait on occasion.
But basically you're fishing with little jigs, little twister tails, and if you're fishing where there's some brush, take a little spinner.
One of these little harness spin rigs and put on the front. That makes the lure a little bit weedless.
So you can work it through the brush piles. Also if that water is murky or a little bit off color, the fish will stay in there.
The crappie won't really move out of murky water. He becomes a little more dormant and he can't see to feed.
He can't smell this artificial lure very well. So the vibration put off by that little spinner blade, the vibration and the flash will attract that fish to the bait.
As well as it will help it keep from hanging up a little bit.
So I think if you'll just concentrate on using small curly tails, soft plastics and little jigs with maybe some with a little living rubber legs and the chenille body.
These are your basic crappie and bluegill baits right here for your early spring, summer and late fall fishing.
Prior to owning the Chevrolet, I had a Ford. Well I switched to the Chevy because I liked the looks better than the Ford.
I found out that they had completely redid the truck. You need a four wheel drive truck.
You don't want to have to get out and lock your wheels in if you want to go into four wheel drive. You can just shift into it.
This Chevrolet truck is the best vehicle I have ever owned. If you don't believe it, just go out and try it yourself.
Hey Jim, you ready to go catch some of these traps?
Sure enough, let's go get them on.
Listen, before we go, how about reviewing some of those techniques with that soft plastic before we go out there and start sticking?
Alright, good idea.
You said Stu that if you had one lure that would be a jig and I agree with you.
I don't know really what a jig imitates, some kind of a bug maybe but it bounces along the bottom and kind of undulates and it looks tasty so trout obviously attack it as other fish do.
This is a teeny jig. It's very effective. This color is nice. I also like black. Sizes depend on the kind of situations we're in when we're trout fishing.
Small jigs like this one thirty second ounce is very effective and you can even cast these on a fly rod if you want without having to use ultralight.
Jim, when we're jig fishing for trout, what weight primarily should we be using in the conditions we're looking at here?
Well, the biggest consideration is if you're fishing a river to current. Generally speaking, trout are going to be on the bottom.
No matter whether you're fishing early in the morning, late in the afternoon, at night or during the day.
You want that jig to bounce bottom so obviously if you're fishing in a river that's got a pretty fast current you might want to use something as large as quarter ounce.
Sixteenth of an ounce. I think trout prefer very small lures, baits, jigs, whatever.
But sometimes you need a bigger jig to get down because of the current factor.
But in general situations I like about a sixteenth ounce jig and sometimes a thirty second.
Of course a thirty second is a little difficult to cast but in lots of stream situations you don't have to cast very far anyway.
So it depends with the current.
In lakes I like a sixteenth of an ounce. That seems to be the size that fits most trout.
You're looking at fish that will be anywhere from ten to fourteen inches. That's about the general range of trout.
Now there are some exceptions. When we're talking about lake trout, we're talking about critters that are anywhere from five to twenty-five, thirty pounds.
So in that case I like to use a big jig like this. This is an ounce and a half.
It's a bucktail jig.
That's a bucktail jig, yep.
And you can easily sweeten the hook on this jig with a plastic trailer here just like you would for walleyes or anything else.
And you've got a little trailer and I'll let this lure hit the bottom and then just take a couple of cranks just maybe eighteen inches off the bottom.
And then just jig it real slowly. You don't want to sharply jig it because there's enough tension in that line.
There's enough stretch in that line that's not going to do much good. You just want to jig it up off the bottom.
When a fish hits, even though he might be a fifteen, twenty pound fish, you're not going to get a hard jerk because of that stretch.
You'll just barely feel it.
Just a weight sensation?
Right, just a weight sensation. When he hits you want to sock it to him as hard as you possibly can because you've got that stretch and you're straight down.
But this is one of the tricks that's really coming on strong in western lakes as well as some places in the Great Lakes.
And again, it only works when those fish are stacked in pods so you can basically locate them.
A color that I like when I'm fishing for trout during the spawning period, which is generally in the spring, is something that imitates their eggs.
Because trout love to eat other trout's eggs. And this is basically the color of roe, the trout egg.
This is kind of a fluorescent red. There's another jig here that has a bit of orange and black on it.
Anything that stimulates the trout's appetite by looking like an egg is always good.
Rainbows are spring spawners so basically you'll be using these colors for rainbows in the spring.
Brown trout are fall spawners so you'll be using these colors for browns.
But by and large though, I like the earth tone colors. I like the browns and the blacks.
My all time favorite is a black jig. When all else fails I always go to black.
Another thing I'd like to point out is practically all trout live on minnows a good share of the year.
And I like this particular bait here. It's called the Sassy Shiner. It's weedless. The hook is right here in this fold.
And I've had great luck on this, especially for rainbows in April and May and for browns almost any time of the year.
It imitates a Shiner which lives in lots of trout lakes and it's also effective in rivers.
That hook is actually hidden in between two folds.
It's actually hidden but it's open. You don't have to pull it through anything like you did bass fishing.
It's protected by those two folds coming up over the hook.
It's really soft and usually you hook a good percentage of the strikes that you get with this particular lure.
Another one I like, in the west shad are prevalent in lots of lakes and trout love to feed on shad and the Sassy Shad is excellent.
I like to use this lure especially early in the morning for brown trout.
Browns are the warriest of all the trout and if you can catch a big brown trout generally that's the big prize in fishing.
And the best time to catch a big brown with a lure like this would be just at the crack of dawn before the sun's over the eastern mountains and when it's kind of gray.
When you don't want to get out of the sleeping bag or out of the camper and you're wanting to have an extra cup of coffee.
That's the time you need to be out there fishing for browns and essentially that's true for all the trout.
That particular bait that you had in your hand is one that we catch a lot of strikers on and I'm sure you catch a lot of bass on the Sassy Shad.
That's an excellent all around bait.
It's a super breakthrough in a bait that will catch a lot of different kind of predator fish.
I've seen this lure in the tackle box of every fisherman I know.
It's really made a big hit on the work bait.
I'm about ready to go put some of this technique to work.
I need to get my boots on and maybe we can slip over here to the river and catch some of them.
Alright, let's give it a try.
You think he's going to wait until you get your boots on?
No, he's going to make a camp.
I'll bet you he's going to wait.
We've got a bet on the first fish here, don't we?
Successful trout fishing depends a lot on being able to read the water effectively, knowing where fish are going to lie.
Essentially, trout will position themselves in the stream where there's adequate food.
That makes sense.
They're going to be lying in a place where natural food will be drifting down to them
and places where they can find food coming down from vegetation or places where there might be some insect hatches.
Let's take a look at this river here and see what we've got.
On the far side of this river, directly across from me, there's a bunch of willows growing that are overhanging the water.
Now, insects will climb up out of the bank in the larval stage.
Up onto the willows where they'll undergo a metamorphosis and they'll fly off and mate and complete their cycle.
Trout will lie near those willows, sometimes even under the bank, waiting for those insects to climb up.
They'll take them on the way up.
They'll take them as they fall off.
They'll take them as they actually enter the water briefly to lay the eggs.
That's always a good spot to fish whenever there's overhanging vegetation.
In this situation, the river is too wide for me to cast over to those bushes,
so I'll look for some similar to those on my side, try to get downstream, cast up, and work the lure along with the current.
I'd also like to vary my technique and get upstream, cast down, and then just bounce it up.
Real good place to work it.
Another place that you'll find trout will be right out in the current itself.
Notice this big boil down here.
That's caused by a large boulder.
That boulder has caused a break in the water current.
There's a bit of an eddy behind it, and behind the eddy there's a big, smooth slick.
Now, if I was looking for a trout in this particular segment, I would first work the eddy below the boulder.
There might be a fish lying in there waiting for food to come down around.
If that doesn't work, then I'll start casting all the areas I can down in that long run, that long slick.
But don't overlook the riffles.
There's lots of shallow areas where trout will lie, places you'd never expect to see a trout.
This big eddy is just made for a jig fisherman.
Take a look at it.
It starts off up at the head of this fast water.
The river sweeps around.
Some of the water goes on down, but a good share of it makes a big curl.
It comes right at me and goes right back around this shore.
This would be a tough place to fish a spinner, because a spinner basically has to be fished against the current,
but with a jig you can do anything.
Remember, when you fish a jig, always bounce it on the bottom.
That drives trout crazy, especially when it makes little puffs of mud when it's bouncing on the bottom,
and that's what it'll do when you're working it right.
Give that jig a chance to work.
Let it seek out all those little spots.
Bounce it around.
Maybe Mr. Fish will be home.
Yeah, we were talking about the parallels between striper and hauler.
Yeah, they're pretty strong, and that might be because they're both open water fish.
Do you get quite a bit of striper action on deep water or shallow water reef areas, like we do with walleyes?
They've got to be humps.
Hi, guys.
Well, look who's here.
Major Bach, the great trout killer.
What are you all up to?
We're just talking about the comparison between walleyes and stripers,
and how they're related, and how we catch them utilizing the same techniques.
We'll take a lure that's either a weight-forward spinner or a jig with a top spinner on it,
like this Sassy Shiner lure, and we'll cast it directly at that fish that's on the line,
and we'll get two or three other guys cast right at that fish that's down there,
and chances are, better than most, that you'll pick up a couple more extra fish right alongside that one.
You've got to be retrieving that bait pretty quickly.
Quick action, plus the fact that if you are casting these things at suspended fish,
if you can get your lure right back in the water almost as quickly as possible,
once you've either released the fish or whatever,
chances are you'll pick up one or two other quick ones that are in those tight schools,
because when they suspend, they'll suspend in schools of maybe 20 or 30 fish,
swim very tight, and then move off very quickly.
But if you can get them right back there quickly, you'll pop a few extra ones.
When you see that bass fish, and as a general rule,
if you see a second fish following the one you've got hooked, it's usually a bigger fish.
Usually the smaller fish is the one you have hooked when you're fishing for bass.
That's right.
The bigger one is chasing it.
Well, the walleye are basically the same way.
The younger fish are the more aggressive fish,
and they have a tendency to run up and grab that thing quickly and take off with it.
But you'll find them schooling by size, too.
We'll get a lot of small fish suspended up high,
and we'll cast top spinners and weight forwards.
We'll cast bait and twister tail jigs at them, too, which is my love,
and we'll do very well with that.
Do you ever try to get below the fish or in the front of a school of fish
and pick a bigger fish?
You know, that's an interesting part.
We're still talking about suspended walleyes.
I like to cast, well, any of these jigs and drop it down below the smaller ones.
If we're getting a lot of fast action on little fish suspended up high,
we'll drop it down underneath, or school a white bass.
You'll usually get the school of walleye working underneath it,
and we'll drop these things down, let them suspend.
And as they're dropping, that's usually when you get your hit.
That bait's going down, the fish grabs it,
or else when you're just beginning to start your retrieve and the lure's like that,
changing direction from the drop, that's when they'll grab that thing.
It really triggers a strike.
But when your walleye suspend, do they suspend open like Stu says a striper do,
or do they suspend like over a hump or off a point, something like that?
All of the above.
Walleye will relate to structure.
They'll lay right on it.
If you've got a sharp drop-off like some of these mountain reservoirs
in Tennessee, southwest, they'll hang on the drop-offs,
and they'll suspend out in the open water.
Later on in the season, as the temperature starts to stratify
and you get a cold water layer and a thermal climb built up in warm water on top,
you'll see them stratified in there in the comfort zone.
They're similar to a bass in that respect,
but they seem to stratify around the thermal climb.
Absolutely.
You know, I want to tell you guys a little bit about some of the tricks
that we've been using for walleye up on the Great Lakes and down south too.
This is a floating jighead, and it's really a versatile rig.
Of course, we use the floating jigheads with just a leader like that
and a slip sinker, and we'll either fish it with a twister tail on the back of it
or live bait too, and cast it and bounce the bottom.
Of course, the fish will grab it, run off, you release your bail,
let the fish run with it, and set the hook on it, right?
Well, that's your normal setup.
You see that I've got a little snap on this, and I've made a little leader on it,
and what I'll do is attach this thing to the front hook of a crankbait like that.
And if we're out there trolling, for instance,
and the fish are actively hitting a crankbait, suddenly they shut off,
I'll take my floating jig and twister tail and snap it to that front hook.
I'll take the front hook off, and that way it keeps your lure on a downward planing angle,
and we'll pick up a couple extra fish on this,
and at times it's even lots of tournaments for our guys up on the Great Lakes.
How about fishing for walleyes and rivers and stream situations
when they're spawning in the spring, Bud?
Any special techniques there that you like?
Jigs, jigs, and more jigs.
My favorite is probably just a quarter ounce or anywhere from an eighth ounce
to a three-eighths ounce leadhead jig.
This, of course, is a marabou, which is excellent.
These colors are excellent in the springtime, too.
I prefer, during colder water, white, yellow,
and, of course, if the water's muddy, then we use our fluorescent colors.
Bud, when you fish these jigs in the spring or in the summer
and you use a soft plastic trailer on it,
do you try to color coordinate the color of the jig with the color of the trailer?
Yes. Primarily, we'll put a twister tail on the same color as the dressing on the jig,
or try to color coordinate as best we can to imitate the natural forage that's in the area.
You know, and when we're fishing the shallow reefs for walleyes and rocky points and islands,
water that's four to eight feet deep,
what we'll try to do is make our lure as weedless as possible.
We'll utilize this keeper concept,
and we'll try to make that hook as covered up as we can.
We'll stick it through there, and I like that trick you showed me earlier, Roger.
We could just have that point come out, just a little bit of the barb,
and then bury it back in again, back into the body.
Then as soon as the fish hits or grabs it, it pops it right open and it nails it.
It's a lot easier to hook them.
I like that. That's a bass trick that I'm going to use on walleyes. That's a good idea.
Jim was talking about deep water fishing with this bait.
We deep water jig fish at Lake Erie 2, all down 50 to 60 feet.
It is about as deep as we've jig fished actively.
I was talking to some other friends of mine, how deep do walleyes actually go?
We've picked them up in Lake Erie, 110 feet deep below the salmon.
I've heard in Lake Michigan that the chub dippers, the commercial guys, have actually picked them up 220 feet deep.
We'll try it over here at the lake and see how it works.
As a matter of fact, that's a super idea.
You guys had your turn on the trout string. We need to go try that and a couple of other things over here at the lake.
What do you say?
Let's try it.
Yeah, we need to go.
All right. See if you can go catch a striper.
Or a walleye.
All right.