Mastering the Dropshot

Mastering the Dropshot

The dropshot is without a doubt one of the hottest finesse techniques. I don’t care whether you’re fishing in shallow, dirty water or deep, crystal-clear water, there’s a time when it can outproduce just about anything else. Why is it so good? Well, it presents the bait off the bottom and keeps it horizontal. There are not many other presentations that accomplish that. It’s a very natural representation of a baitfish. To use it to its maximum effectiveness, though, you need to choose the right leader length. It’s a critical part of making it work. You need to know when […]

Chicken Rig Your Craw

Chicken Rig Your Craw

Most of you know something about the chicken rig. Traditionally, the chicken rig was a weedless way to Neko rig a straight tail worm. I’m in love with doing that but I’ve expanded the concept to include one of the most effective and natural looking bass baits on the planet — the craw.  We’ll start with the hook. My favorite, by far, is the VMC Finesse Neko hook. The thing I really like about it is that there are two pieces of heavy fluorocarbon line on the top of the shaft of the hook up towards the eye. That keeps […]

My Bait for Extreme Conditions

My Bait for Extreme Conditions

Here we go, guys. We all know that spring is almost here. That’s a good thing, but it also presents us with problems — wild weather and extreme conditions. On Monday it might be a picture-perfect day, but on Tuesday it’ll be spitting ice and snow. When that happens I reach for the one bait I know they’ll eat — a hair jig. I’m talking about when all of the standard finesse baits and techniques don’t get you even one bite. The thing is, though, about hair jigs is that no lure made has more small, seemingly insignificant differences to […]

The Soner Euro Cup

The Soner Euro Cup

After some street fishing in Paris late this summer, we moved on to Spain. We — Becky, myself and the youngest kids — spent a couple of days in Madrid before I fished the Soner Euro Cup on Lake Cigara near Madrid. My partner and I won it! How cool is that? The Euro Cup was a really exciting experience for me. There were something like 125-130 boats with two man teams in them. As best I can remember there were something like 25 or 30 countries represented, some of them from thousands of miles away. And, as you might […]