W hen it comes to the bright, hot days of summer, I stuff my tackle bags with soft baits, what we used to call “rubber.” In my travel kit, I carry lots of styles, shapes, and sizes, and all the hooks, bullet weights, and jigheads that go along with them.
Come summer, I have a lot of confidence fishing softies. I know they work in the sizzling season, and I like to think I know how to work them.
The great thing about soft plastics is that there’s so many of them. Without going into a litany, which surely would forget some, we have worms of all sizes and tails, straight-body stickbaits, grubs, natural-shaped imitations such as crayfish, minnows, and lizards, and also tubes in several sizes and every conceivable color.
I, like so many anglers, will follow the trends, and in recent years, I’ve used a lot of straight-tail soft stickbaits and swimbaits. But since I’m an ornery cuss, I also use stuff that’s not quite in fashion.
Last summer I had the pleasure of fishing with a top weekend tournament angler here in Pennsylvania, and we were doing quite well, intermittently catching some nice largemouths. It was the kind of summer day you can expect in summer. Individually we were getting three to five bites an hour working soft sticks rigged wacky style. But as the strikes per hour turned from five to three and down to two, I got real ornery and reached in my large bag of soft plastics for a 7-inch straight-tail worm in – of all colors – strawberry metal flake. An old secret weapon.
I saw my partner snicker a bit as I rigged up with a 3/16-ounce tungsten weight and a 4/0 wide-gap hook. Tungsten instead of lead and a wide-gap in place of a straight-shank were my nods to modernity, but in all other aspects, this was a worm, a rig, and a color I’ve been using for 20 years at least.
To make a pleasant story short, we continued to work the weeds and structure-filled points that had now turned cold but within a short time I had three unanswered largemouths, with some other disconnections. After the third, my partner dug around and found a straight-tail worm he trusted and picked up his first bass after a long hiatus. With his success, I think he dammed himself with a popular phrase – a statement I’ve always considered rather curious and punitive.
The good old rubber worm is a soft plastic I still throw, not only as a change-up but also as a fast ball during the hot summer. If you’ve been neglecting this wonderful bait, give it a new appraisal.
Another plastic that has gone out of fashion in the recent frenzy of stickbaits, swimbaits, and such is the bait originally called a “spider grub.” I know at one time the spider was the proper name for a particular brand of bait, but like many soft plastics, the style was stolen and renamed by other manufacturers. The spider grub has a thick, core body while its head contains an array of thin filaments, like a backwards tube, and the back end is two grub tails. Some spider grubs have additional appendages, namely flappers or flippers, and these additions have pushed them into the realm of what we now call “creature baits,” which were hot for a number of years but have gone out of heavy fashion. Pity.
Sadly, I can still remember my first use of a spider grub. I barely could figure how to hook it, but the strange-looking bait caught a good bass within minutes. I was surprised and remained so through a couple of other largemouths that day.
Harking back again to last summer, I pulled out a pumpkin pepper/green flake Yum Gonzo Grub in the middle of a hot day. I wasn’t doing very well on soft stickbaits, worms or anything else. I rigged it with a 3/16-ounce tungsten weight and a 4/0 wide-gap hook and shoved a glass rattle into its belly.
At the time, I was working a heavily pressured medium-size lake. It was a hot, horrible day with the water temperature sparking into the mid-80s by early afternoon. The water had also turned an unpleasant green, but still the bass were charging and splashing bait now and then.
Casting to a weed line, I let the spider grub rest on the bottom, then I put my rod down on the deck and went for a gulp of water. It was a breezeless day, and the boat sat motionless in the water. When I lifted the rod a few minutes later, I felt weight and set the hook. I did this two other times simply by letting the bait sit motionless for minutes before doing anything.
A trick like this works with spider grubs because of all those thin filaments at the head. The strands sway and wave around even without a forward motion of the bait. Actually I like to modify creature baits to get more dead action from them. I nip off quite a few of the plastic strips and I’ll take a pen knife or a pair of scissors and give the remaining filaments split ends. Split them about a half inch up from the end, and they’ll produce a little more motion.
Overall, styles and shapes of the soft plastics aren’t the only thing that goes in and out of fashion. So does color. These days we use lots of watermelon, pumpkin pepper, shad, and lately a color called “peanut butter and jelly.” It works well.
But does anyone remember purple and black, and more recently Junebug, red shad, grape, and an old classic, motor oil.
For kicks, I used a Junebug ribbon-tail worm last summer, and it was a great producer. The bass – which hadn’t been born when this color and style was really hot – seemed to say, “Hey, this is something new is it?”
Finally, instead of using a short-tail finesse worm one afternoon – a bait that hasn’t gone out of style – I tossed a 4-inch ring fry. The broader body of the fry fell slower than any thin finesse bait, and the tepid-water bass bothered to react. Mind you, I was only fishing a farm pond, and although the bass were nearly broiled, it was the fry that got them.
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