Soft Plastics Help

[GoTakeANap]

Hello everyone. I went fishing this morning and had a great day on the water. Started out pretty rough being that I missed 6 fish before I caught the 1st fish of the day using a Zoom Trick Worm. The picture below is the setup I was using. Zoom Trick Worm, 1/8oz lead and a 3/0 worm hook on a MH fast action rod. I ended up catching 1 other fish on this setup the rest of the day. Ended up 2/15 on the Trick Worm. My question is. Do I need to use a bigger hook? Different style of hook? Bigger Lead? Need to improve my hooksets?

 

 

I switched to Zoom Ultra Vibe Speed Craw. Same setup with weight,hook and rod. Caught 8/10 on the speed craw. The hook almost covers the entire Speed Craw and im sure thats probably why my hookups were alot better. Do I continue to use this same hook? Should I be using a different hook on this Speed Craw?

 

 

Also thought about this while fishing today. I cant ever make my mind up on what size bullet weight to use. Is there some sort of rule of thumb on choosing the right weight size?

 

Thanks for the help.

[Jmoose]

Sometimes fish will only take the back end of the bait and won't enhale it for a couple seconds. A bigger hook and waiting to set the hook will help you hookup ratio.

[Matthew2000]

I would go up to a 4/0 and invest in some megastrike, it will keep the fish on a bit longer and they may inhale it more.

[Jmoose]

Also, a really wide gapped hook helps tremendously. The large gap gives more hook to set. It's good to have at least twice the thickness of the bait or more in gap.

[Ben Eipert]

One thing I have found that helped my hook up on soft plastics is lighter wire hooks and skin hooking or leaving the point out depending on the cover. Also you have let them swallow it and run for a few seconds.

[papajoe222]

There are quite a few reasons why your hook-up success was better with the speed craw, the least of which was your choice of hook size/style. That is a good choice as far as size goes and the style of hook is more of a personal preference thing vs. a hard fast rule.

As far as what size weight to use there are a number of factors to take into consideration. First and foremost being how you are rigging it.  For a true Texas rig, with the weight free to slide up or down the line, most anglers like to go with the lightest weight possible that still allows you to keep contact with it. Wind has a lot to do with that.  I prefer to go heavier because the way I fish this rig, the plastic is the only thing a fish will inhale.  For a pegged sinker, or when swimming a Texas rig, I will go as light as possible and increase it depending on conditions or the depth of water I'm fishing. Unlike fishing a jig, either of those two presentations will produce more bites when moving the bait or dead sticking rather than on the fall.

[Weld's Largemouth]

You might want to put the hook out infront of the plastic properly then skin the tip. Otherwise the hook just stays in the plastic.

[rosshilk]

If you are really struggling with fishing that worm in that manner maybe just try to fish it wacky style. I like to fish trick worms weightless with the hook ran through the middle so the worm dangles on both sides of the hook. The hook is exposed and generally the fish almost hook themselves. This is a really easy techniques and might maximize the use of your trick worms. I have found this method to be deadly especially this time of the year.

[Choporoz]

Early in the season.  Is it possible that your sense of the bite, reaction time, and hook-set improved as the day went on?  Or, that the bass were more aggressive in taking the bait later in the day?   Maybe the trick worm was getting picked at by blue-gills?  As others said above, skin-hook those plastics - tex-pose, them: pull the point all the way through and then stick just the point barely back into the plastic.

[smalljaw67]

Your hook wasn't the problem, I try to use the smallest hook possible because it leaves more of the worm free which means more action. Look at 6" finesse worms that are nose hooked with a size 1 octopus hook, bass normally hit the head or the entire worm, if you were missing fish it was most likely due to fish just mouthing the tail and not really interested, I've seen them do that. The hook up ratio on the craw tells me a lot more, it is telling me they wanted the craw so they were eating but more importantly you still missed 2 out of 10 which doesn't normally happen when they are really on. Now, you can go up to a 4/0 hook but remember, the larger the hook the less action and when fish are negative or neutral the fact it has less action could work for you.