From experience, he can tell when the body is about to swing around and come back toward him. At that point, he lets up and allows the bait to glide and tumble back to him. While it’s gliding back, he maintains control over it with his rod tip, “kicking the bait” softly onto its side, as if it’s using its last ounce of muscle to right itself. “It doesn’t look as real if you let it just fall without adding that little tail kick,” Wood says.
Wood doesn’t always use only the weight of the body and the hook. He often cuts a small hole on the underside of the body and pushes a 1/16-ounce split shot up into the plastic to a position below the shank of the hook.
“That helps the body ride in a more normal, upright position,” he says, “so you have the choice of allowing it to lie on its side or working it more upright. If you fish it on a tighter line, the body stays more upright. More slack allows it to fall over on its side.
Wood experiments by embedding a small glass rattle, such as the Venom Lures Max-Mag worm rattle. “My first choice is getting it into the tail,” he says. “That way, even when worked real subtle, you get a little rattling.”
If a fish makes a pass at it but doesn’t get hooked, Wood makes the bait appear to be on its last legs. He wants it to be almost stationary, should the fish come back around to finish it off. It’s not uncommon for a trout or pike to come through and bash the bait with a closed mouth, or slash through and get “a mouthful of real minnows,” Wood says.
In the clear, shallow water where this system excels, one of the keys to its effectiveness is that the plastic minnow bodies stand up to close visual inspection by a predator fish.
Learn to Trigger
After warming up in the shallows, it’s time to broaden our perspective. You’ll often be on a “locator bite,” where your depthfinder is your underwater vision.
Jigging, one rod at a time, is Dave Genz’s forte. He long ago gave up the search for a magic lure, or the one color that works when everything else fails. Genz believes in the power of being in the right place. If you’re over fish, you’ll catch some. But to become a dragon slayer, you must develop your talent with the baits you use.
“To become good at triggering bites, you have to put the lure down and watch it,” Genz says. “Learn how to run it, so you know what your rod is doing to the lure, should you pump it aggressively, or more softly, or just shake it.
“I see guys put on a lure and drop it down into 30 feet of water, then have no clue what their lure is doing in response to their jigging motions.”
In the past year, Genz has expanded his study by cutting a hole adjacent to the one he fishes, and lowering the camera of his Aqua-Vu to study it. That, he says, has taken the guessing out of the equation when he has more line out.
