Here is an alternate idea to using tubes

[SENKOSAM]

Last year I started using silicone or living rubber strands pulled through a grub body after cutting off the curl tail. The action is super finesse and superb for drop shotting and tandem rigs for bass and panfish.

All you need is a fine leader wire or electric wire and some short skirt strands. Skirts or skirt tabs in any color combo can be bought from lurecraft.com or fishingskirts.com.

Push the wire loop either down the grub body out through the center of the back end or in the opposite direction. The silicone is only pulled through 1/4" of the rear of the grub. I add a retention drop of superglue to the exit.

In the pictures below, the first successfull bait was formed using a small grub with the curl tail removed and wire pushed into the body as shown.

Here are a few other examples:

This year I decided to go up in body size and use a larger, thicker caterpillar grub (pictured). A curl tail is only adequate when the lure is moving, but is useless when at rest. Silicone strands have the most finesse action of any materials I've used and turn on even the most sedate fish. Even tube skirts don't compare.

Silicone-skirted grubs are great for tandem rigs, drop shotting and other vertical presentations using light jigheads. Late last summer and into fall, I found incredible schools of panfish and used the tandem rig under a stick bobber. For this rig I used 1. a single hook (palomar tied above) with a nose-hooked grub and 2. a 1/16 oz. jighead or dropshot weight tied below on 12" of line.; bobber optional (but always fun to watch go down). 6# test flourocarbon line was more than adequate. I fished in 5-10' of water over hard bottoms.

The number of double hook-ups were incredible.

I'm looking forward to using the large unweighted grub and skirt in place of tubes after ice out all through spring. It's not as though a thousand other lures wouldn't work this time of year, but giving them something they haven't seen usually generates at least the novelty strike.