Spring and Spinnerbaits

Spring is the perfect time of year to tie on a spinnerbait in Taiwan. The flashy blades are the perfect enticement for a strike when the water is stained or slightly off color from rain, as it often case during most times of the year. For bedding bass, the fluttering blades are particularly irritating and will usually trigger satisfyingly hard strikes.

I tend to be a creature of habit when it comes to bass, and lately I've been relying more heavily on finesse baits at local ponds, like shaky worms or Texas and wacky-rigged worms. I recently decided to give my spinnerbaits a workout and ended up using them all day long. The cast-to-strike ratio may not have been quite as high as with a worm, but because you tend to retrieve a spinnerbait more quickly, this didn’t affect the number of fish hauled in on this particular morning.

Some local anglers may not have spinner baits in their tackle boxes because they can be hard to find in local fishing shops and when they do turn up they are inexplicably pricey. I avoided this problem by picking up a few while back in the U.S. this winter.

The usefulness of a spinnerbait is not limited to the bass pond. They can be productive in canals, around heavy weeds and other cover, making them a nice change of pace for snakehead anglers tired of the ubiquitous topwater frog. You can also toss them in estuaries for barramundi and red drum.

One of the tricks to using a spinnerbait is tying them on correctly. Here is a simple knot I use that works great.

Rigging Soft Plastics (Worms) for Bass

I have made a lot of references to different ways to rig soft plastic baits for bass--Texas style, Carolina style, wacky style. I'm always on the lookout for a good guide that shows what these various rigs look like and how to tie them. I found a pretty good one on the Gary Yamamoto Web site. For those that don't know Yamamoto, he is a California-based angler and soft bait maker that revolutionized plastic worms with his much imitated Senko stick worms, that are the preferred style for wacky worming. I hope you find these useful.