Worm Stories

[Mobasser]

My own " worm story" started in Chillicothe Mo in the late 1960s. I fished a farm pond on my grandfather's farm every evening with my older brother. We used surface baits from our dad's and Grandpa's tackle boxes.                  My brother bought a three pack of black Creme Scoundrel worms from the local hardware store. The store owner had a rep as a good bass fisherman. He also had a dusty mount of a bass around eight pounds hanging on the wall that was caught on a plastic worm from a local lake.                              I still remember what he told us." Boys, you need to learn this plastic worm fishing. On a daily basis, it will out fish anything". He told us to fish them slowly near the bottom. For much of that first summer, we nose hooked these worms with Eagle Claw bait hooks, and caught bass this way.               Later, my brother ordered worm hooks and bullet weights and we learned to Texas rig. Being able to fish weedless was HUGE. I've loved the plastic worm ever since. After all these years, it's still a killer bass lure.                                            What is your own " worm story?" How were you introduced to the plastic worm? Was it easy for you to learn? What brand / model was your first plastic worm?

[T-Billy]

All my good worm stories involve a bottle of el toro, and should not be told here. 😆 They probably shouldn't be told anywhere actually. That rot gut will make you take back stuff you never stole.

[ElGuapo928]

My first worms came from the tin foil pans at Yellow Front in 83 or 84…purple and red 4” straight tails at 3 cents a piece. Add in some 1/4 oz “Tournament Tackle” jigheads and I was set.

 

Went to San Carlos Lake the next day, not having much understanding of technique, was throwing them out and cranking straight back in, with nothing but a bluegill to show for it. A couple weeks (and a couple episodes of Orlando Wilson) later, we went back to San Carlos and I was slowly dragging them across the point, and got my first bass - weighing probably 10-12 oz, but enough to get me hooked. 
 

40 years and untold thousands of dollars later, the worm, in all of it’s various forms, accounts for the majority of my arsenal.

[greentrout]

The sad loss of Walmart's 6” Renegade Tequila Sunrise twirl tail worm. The Lucky Strike worm did not replace it in my estimation. Caught a lot of bass T Rigged with it. Those were good days.

[LrgmouthShad]

Younger angler here. So 2016 when I started fishing, I was using hard baits. One of the first lures that I bought was actually a shad rap. I saw it on some shelf and thought it looked really fishy. It looked like it had some history behind it, too. I actually crushed fish on shad raps in a weedy lake. I would work it erratically and snatch it free of grass. But the man who kinda helped me get started into fishing noticed that I was wanting to start targeting bass because that’s all I saw on YouTube. So he gifted me with a small box of plastics and told me that if I wanted to catch bass, it was going to be hard to beat plastics. I loved my shad raps and other crankbaits but I finally did try the plastics one day after learning to Texas rig and I was amazed. Now I could really target bass in those thick weeds. To answer your question, yes, it was pretty easy to learn to fish a worm. And that’s all she wrote. I think the first worm I tried was a yum ribbontail.

[scaleface]

I was fishing and not catching anything . I met a man who said he was tearing them up with a jig and pig . I didnt have any jigs or pigs and never texas rigged before. I slid a sinker on my line , then a black rubber skirt stolen from a spinnerbait . Tied on a hook and texas rigged a black Mister Twister twin tail . I cast it at some rip rap and hopped it like I read about. On the drop I felt a slight tic just like I read, reeled down and set the hook on a keeper bass. That was the start . Next trip I had a bag of Jelly worms and wore the bass out with them ever since.

[Catt]

Some where back in the 60s my dad rented a wooden boat that had slats nailed across the ribs for a floor. I noticed what turned out to be a Scoundrel worm (black with two yellow stripes).

 

Dad rigged it weedless for me & I cast it out & let it sit while eating a sandwich. I noticed a whole row of pencil reeds laying over in a stright line & thought what the hell. Dad screamed set hook, I did & caught a nice 2# chunk.

 

60+ yrs later still chunking worms!

[Catt]

Ringworms ?

 

1972 after my second weekend trip in a row to Toledo Bend I had yet to catch a bass. As I stood on the dock unloading the boat I picked up my worm rod which had a Texas Rigged Blue Rebel Ringworm in it. I made a 20 yd cast to a cypress tree & was rewarded with a 3# chunk.

 

Since that day I've caught double digit bass across 5 southern states, won tournaments, caught my biggest stringers all on Ringworms.

 

2019 I won a Dodge Ram with a Ringworm

 

Rings offer a larger profile yet has less plastic for the hook to penetrate.

 

[rgasr63]

My step brother introduced me to worm fishing in the mid 70's. We were using the Mann's jelly worm in black. I was using a Eagle Claw weedless worm hook that  we got from K-Mart. The first fish that I caught was a 2lber. Since that day I was hooked myself. The Texas rig and just a bit later the floating worm has been very rewarding to me for so many years.

[Alex from GA]

About 1980 a friend took me to a tournament, on Lake Castaic, as his partner and introduced me to worm fishing and doodling.  Being mostly an ocean fisherman I didn't know much about bass fishing but was a quick learner.  I caught the big fish, $108.  All he wanted to do is beat Don Iovino, who he taught to doodle, and we did.  We used a hand pour 4" brown, black and orange Smittys worm made locally.  I still have a couple.  Today I use a worm probably 70% of my fishing time.  Too old and sore to chunk and wind all day.

[Pat Brown]

One time when I was fishing on the bank.  I saw a man give a young boy a beetle spin and it was downright heart-worming.

 

Another time I was fishing in the spring and it had been cold for many days and then I started catching em real good and I realized that it was cuz the water done wormed up.

 

Another time I caught a bass in the summer and I'll tell you what.  Sure as I stand here that bass was worm to the touch.

 

Good thread y'all!

[Bazoo]

On 10/21/2023 at 8:30 AM, scaleface said:

I was fishing and not catching anything . I met a man who said he was tearing them up with a jig and pig . I didnt have any jigs or pigs and never texas rigged before. I slid a sinker on my line , then a black rubber skirt stolen from a spinnerbait . Tied on a hook and texas rigged a black Mister Twister twin tail . I cast it at some rip rap and hopped it like I read about. On the drop I felt a slight tic just like I read, reeled down and set the hook on a keeper bass. That was the start . Next trip I had a bag of Jelly worms and wore the bass out with them ever since.

UH...WOW! Thank you for sharing that. Especially the rigging part. It sounds like to me the hottest thing in jig fishing. Piecing together a jig like that would come close to eliminating the fish rejecting the jig due to feeling the weight I'd bet. A Texas Rigged Jig, I'm going to try it.

[Bazoo]

 

I don't remember what worm, but I believe it was a purple/blue ribbontail. Best I recall I'd rigged it Carolina style. I think I was about 12. I didn't catch another bass on a worm for years. I bass fished until I was bout 25 but ended up taking a break until this last spring.

 

When I got back into it, the first fish I caught was on a Texas Rigged Zoom Lizard. I've made it my goal in fishing to learn and use all the different lures and techniques that I find "hard" or otherwise never learned or mastered previously.

[bp_fowler]

A few years back we moved to my wife’s home town.  It was a bit of a change for me to be living in a more rural area especially one where I didn’t know anyone.  My wife was tired of me loafing around the house and said I needed a hobby.  

I saw that most folks around these parts like to hunt and fish.  I dabbled in both growing up but fishing was the easier/cheaper (ha!) of the two options so after a cursory internet search I got a budget spinning combo, a pack of green pumpkin senkos, some hooks and bullet sinkers and off I went to stalk the banks of the numerous local lakes and reservoirs.  
 

It being the middle of August I was hit or miss at first, but once I hooked into a 5+ pound Bass at family friend’s farm pond I knew that this was it for me and I haven’t looked back since.  
 

This past summer I took my son with me fishing. For his first time  I showed him how to tie on a Texas rig with the same green pumpkin senkos. He landed 6 fish that day and now all he wants to do is fish which is fine by me.

[MIbassyaker]

The river back home where I learned to fish as a kid had a lot of catfish, some pike, walleye, & rock bass, misc. other species like goldeye, carp, redhorse suckers, and drum.  So that's what we fished for, using live bait, inline spinners, curly-tail grubs, and rapala minnows.   There were no black bass in the river that we knew of (I would eventually catch a smallmouth there on a live nightcrawler, my first bass, but only once).  

 

But on my TV at home, there were a lot of bass on the fishing shows. I would see Bill Dance fishing for bass with plastic worms. And I would see Al Lindner do it sometimes too.  I would open a bass-pro catalog and see pages of big long squirming worms, and, even though I had never fished with one, dreamed of one day owning every color.  I didn't know anything about bass fishing, but I was sort of mesmerized by the worms themselves. I thought, well maybe I can catch a bass like these guys on TV did. I watched closely how they explained worm rigging, read about it at some point In-fisherman, and I got some bullet weights, hooks and worms (culprits, maybe?) to try it out.

 

Well, my first attempt fishing texas rigged worms in the river was a total bust, and I quickly switched back to a live nightcrawler or whatever it was I had.  I realized I would need to use it where bass lived. I got my chance at a church lake retreat.  I had brought my rod and some fishing stuff, and there was a fishing dock.  My brother and some friends and I went out to try our luck, and ended up catching a few bluegills and crappie.  I thought, I wonder if there's a bass in there.  I rigged up my plastic worm, and tossed it into the nearby reeds...and got an immediate hit -- a 12 inch largemouth. 

 

"Oh, is that all there is to it?" I thought. And, really, it was.

[KP Duty]

My worm as a kid in the late 80's/early 90's was the gene larew 8" hooktail worm in tomato red.  All gene larew stuff was hand poured at that time, and the worms had a flat bottom.  Durability was worse than a senko...2 fish per bait if you were lucky.  We judged a day's fishing by how many worms you went through.  A good day = a 20pk of worms.  I was majorly disaappointed when larew went to injection molding in '93(ish) .  The worms were no longer super soft, and the tomato color wasn't the same.

[WRB]

1st soft plastic worm I used was given to me at Lake Shasta back in 1955 by a old timer helping out a kid. The worm was a pre rigged Creame worm, nature night crawler color with a tiny proper between 2 beads. The old man said use a swivel clip and attached the worm and a 1/4 oz Dempsey sinker, cast and drag down points. The old guy pointed across the bay start over there.

Only had 1 worm and caught several bass on it before snagging it and loosing it. Didn’t know where to buy more, the local marina shop didn’t know and it was a few years before finding more Creame worms at a local shop. 

The Lowly worm* has been my main stay for decades.

Tom

* article by Micheal,Jones

Edited October 22, 2023 by WRB

[bowhunter63]

The old three hook Wonder Worm in the early 70s. I know they would still work today finesse fishing before we knew what it was . 

[RRocket]

In the 1970s for walleye jigging.

 

We'd usually use live worms with a 5/8oz jig head. But if we couldn't get worms we'd use plastic.

[Bankbeater]

I started out fishing a 6" Creme Scoundrel back when I was a kid.  When I got back into fishing that was the first plastic bait that I bought.

[TnRiver46]

I’ve thrown mostly zoom my whole life, they’re pretty good!