Bass Week 2025: Icons of the Drop Shot

“If you're not drop-shotting, you're hurting yourself.”

May 06, 2025 By Gord Pyzer

I’m not sure which adage is more appropriate—timing is everything or it’s better to be lucky than good. But, as chance would have it, back in the 1990s I was conversing with In-Fisherman contributor Rich Zaleski and he mentioned that a friend in Japan was using a novel presentation to tear up the tough tournament scene. The technique was called drop-shotting, and no one on this side of the Pacific was doing it. Rich swore me to secrecy, filled me in on the details, and asked me not to write or talk about it.

The next day I went out on Rainy Lake, before the Canadian Bass Championship, tied on a small split shot hook using a Palomar knot, slid the foot-long tag end back through the eye, and pulled it snug so it kicked out like a dog’s leg. I forget what I was using for bait—a 4-inch soft-plastic worm of some sort—but I remember how smallmouths reacted. I caught the very first bass I dropped to on the sounder. My partner and I finished third, if my memory is correct, and would have won the tournament if we hadn’t parted company with a giant smallmouth that leaped off at the side of the boat on the final day of competition. Faithful to the promise I made to Rich, I didn’t say a word about how we had caught the fish.

Around the same time, I befriended a young bass fisherman in southern California who was turning pro after winning more than a dozen major tournaments. His name was Aaron Martens and we became the best of friends. Aaron was a finesse-fishing savant—lord of the drop-shot.

I remember the time he flew up to muskie fish with me on Rowan Lake. Over dinner we learned from the lodge owner Don Pursch that largemouth bass were rumored to swim in the lake, but no one ever caught them. Aaron’s ears perked up, and the next day when we met up for shorelunch, I found him anchored off the shore of a small island hauling green bass into the boat.

His untimely passing from a brain tumor, at the height of his amazing career, was a kick in the guts, but I kept the notes from our wonderful never-ending conversations and find myself revisiting them often. Many center around his beloved Scrounger jig, but it’s the knowledge, intuition, and interminable imagination that he shared with me about drop-shotting that I cherish the most.

The Master’s Touch

“If you’re not drop-shotting, you’re hurting yourself,” I can hear him say, after I flew to Los Angeles and spent a week fishing lakes Casitas and Castaic with his mother, Carol, his original tournament partner. “A handful of West Coast friends and I got onto it in the early days and kept it a secret for years. No one knew what we were doing and we totally dominated the tournament scene.

“Other presentations like Carolina rigging have short windows, but you can almost always catch fish on a drop-shot rig. Most days it’s the best thing you can do. There’s not a time or place I won’t consider drop-shotting. I drop-shot in deep water, shallow water, and every depth in between. I cast it, drag it, hop it, flip it, and pitch it. There’s no wrong way to drop-shot.”

As if to put an exclamation mark on that summary point of view, I remember following his every cast for three days at the 2012 Bassmaster Elite competition on the Mississippi River in Wisconsin, held under brutally hot conditions. After weighing in the first two days, he was sheepishly coy on stage, saying only that he was doing something that would surprise everyone. I remember staring at my computer screen, watching him grin as the words exited his mouth—and I laughed out loud.

I called him a few days after the competition and he told me that for several hour-long periods, he had caught a bass on consecutive casts. He said he had rubbed his fingers raw from handling so many fish. “It was unbelievable,” he chuckled. “I was catching them on every single cast.”

Practicing what he preached, no technique was more frighteningly effective than drop-shotting, where you swap the traditional positions of your hook and sinker. But with the weight resting on the bottom, you can hover a small, weightless soft-plastic worm, leech, minnow, or crayfish at a specific depth, above bottom debris and snags, and position it perfectly in front of fish.

Shake the Bait, Not the Weight

Equally important, because there’s nothing—no swivels, jigs, sinkers, split shot, or terminal tackle—between your rod tip and lure, you can activate your bait as much or as little as you want, provided you do it on a semi-slack line. Aaron obsessed about this loose washing-line-like manipulation, saying it was essential to your drop-shotting success.

“Most anglers drop-shot a soft-plastic bait vertically over the side of the boat, letting their sinker rest on the bottom, then letting out a little bit more line until it’s semi-slack,” he told me. “Then you can experiment with different speeds of shaking and moving your lure, from dead still to aggressive. But you should never feel your sinker. Never shake the weight. It weirds out the fish. They know something isn’t right. If I could give bass anglers one tip, it would be to always shake your bait, not the weight.”

Another detail that preyed mightily on Aaron’s mind was using the best knot to tie on his typically small, light, wide-gapped, needle-sharp thin-wire hook. All carefully considered components that helped him animate his soft-plastic presents—I still have boxes of Aaron’s Magic tinted Robo Worms—and set the hook with the slightest amount of pressure.

In the early years he used a Palomar knot—still a reliable knot—then a double uni-knot, before settling on a San Diego Jam (Google “San Diego jam knot” to see examples of how to tie it). And always, he fidgeted with the precise length of the light fluorocarbon leader that he passed back through the eye of the hook to make it pop out.

My jaw dropped when I met up with him at ICAST one year and he whispered that he was favoring a 3-inch long leader. But why only 3 inches, I wondered, between his weight and lure?

Early in the season, he said, bass are typically looking down, feeding on crayfish, and you can manipulate your bait better with a shorter leader. Especially, one that’s the same length as your worm. “You can jiggle a worm on a 3-inch leader much better than you can on one that’s 3 feet long,” he said. “You can create a vibration with the worm so that it feels like you’re dribbling a basketball down there.”

Getting the Drop with Forward-Facing Sonar

With the advent of forward-facing sonar and neutrally buoyant baits—tools Aaron didn’t have at his disposal—I find myself paying extra attention these days to the depth smallmouths are hovering above the bottom. It’s why I favor using VMC Tungsten Drop Shot Weights with the line pinch at the top. It lets you constantly fine tune and readjust the length between the weight and the lure without having to retie every time.

Then, I keep the boat a short distance away from the fish, slide the hook under the jaw of a 3.75-inch Crush City Jerk, so the point is barely coming out its mouth, and pitch it beside a bass. I let the line between my rod tip and the surface droop down slightly—like a heavily loaded washing line—shake the bait a time or two, and then hold out perfectly still until I see it tighten. Typically, I don’t feel anything—the bite is purely visual—and when I’m alone, I look over my shoulder and sense Aaron nodding in approval.

The new technology has reinforced another critical concept: the amount of time we used to waste casting, dragging, shaking, pausing, and drop-shotting through an entire retrieve. Nearly always you find the bass huddled together—if not bunched up like grapes—and you catch them either on the initial descent, or the first few feet of the come-back.

It’s revelation that young guns like Bassmaster Elite pro Cooper Gallant are exploiting these days with frightening effectiveness. “I’m a maniac when it comes to being on the trolling motor,” Gallant told me, after finishing fourth at the 2023 Bassmaster Elite tournament on Lake St. Clair. “I found one area the size of four football fields and none of the fish were stationary. They were moving. They were on one end of the flat one day and 800 feet to the right the next day. When I get in situations like that, where the fish are always moving, I just put the electric motor on 10 and go looking for them.”

With a parade of onlooker boats following him, few could believe what they were watching. Gallant would chase a single big bass for up to 15 minutes and then catch it on a drop-shot. “I was going through two different minnow-style baits,” he says. “I was throwing an X-Zone Hotshot minnow and a fluke-style bait. They’re small profile but the bass were really keying in on perch and crayfish.

“The reason I threw the drop-shot is that they were suspended off the bottom. I would just flip that drop-shot out to them and it would get to the bottom quick. I was in 8 or 9 feet of water, throwing a 3/8-ounce weight. I feel in most situations, guys would throw 1/4 ounce in that shallow water, but 3/8 gets down there so quickly. When you see one and you pitch a drop-shot to it, that thing comes down and lands right in front of its face. It all happens so quickly it’s like a reaction bite. And the thud of the weight hitting the sand makes noise and I think they just look at it and it’s like holy cow, they eat it. They don’t think twice. You always hear that drop-shotting is finesse, and it is, but there are times when beefing up the weight and going heavier gets them to react. A drop-shot is so good. It’s so versatile. There aren’t many other techniques you can present smaller baits as naturally as you can with a drop-shot.”

Opening a new frontier, Gallant says he’s even started fishing a drop-shot in the middle of the water column, for suspended smallmouths. It’s a pattern he got onto at Lake Champlain when he found fish suspended in 50 feet of water.

“It looks a little odd,” he says, “but the fish are so curious it doesn’t spook them. Especially, the big unpressured ones that are out deep, chasing bait. They see the sinker, check it out, spot the swimbait, and eat it. It looks a lot more natural. If you put that same swimbait on a ball-head, it won’t work the same way. It doesn’t have the same wobble.”

“When you’re in 50 feet of water the fish can be anywhere from 3 feet under the surface to 20 feet down. What happens now, with Livescope, you can reel the drop-shot past them and if they don’t want it, present the bait differently. So the next cast, there might be a fish 4 or 5 feet below the surface and I throw it right on its head. With a heavy drop-shot weight it falls past it fast and it’ll chase it all the way to the bottom. A lot of times I just deadstick it there and they eat it. There so many ways you can fish it.”

Gord Pyzer, Kenora, Ontario, has been an In-Fisherman Field Editor and TV host for more than 30 years. He’s a former Ontario resource manager, and has been inducted into both the National Fresh Water Fishing Hall of Fame in the U.S. and the Canadian Angler Hall of Fame in Canada, the only angler and writer to be so honored in both countries.