Bass Week: Revisiting the Ol' Ball & Chain

Affiliate Disclosure: This page contains affiliate links. We earn from qualifying purchases.

---

Powered by Strike King and Lew’s

The difference between our mental preconceptions of a lure or a rig’s performance and what actually happens underwater can be a little jarring, or even embarrassing when you see it for the first time. Does your bait move like something alive? Or does it more closely resemble random flotsam, more driftwood than baitfish? Is your bait hovering above bottom? Or is it buried in a morass of muck? Has it picked up a hitchhiker, something like a little zebra mussel “earring” clinging to your creature bait? Is your bullet weight ensnared in strands of grass? Has a bass even seen what you’re showing off? Do they care?

If you’ve pondered these questions, like I have, there’s a fair chance you were considering throwing a Carolina rig. I suggest no bass contraption encompasses more misconceptions about what the thing accomplishes under water—and how it behaves—than this oft-neglected bass tactic.

“It’s a bit of a lost art,” says Hot Springs, Arkansas-based bass pro Stephen Browning, among the sharpest anglers on the Major League Fishing Bass Pro Tour. “But the rig figures prominently in my fishing, and one of the primary reasons it’s so good relates to buoyant versus non-buoyant soft plastics. There’s a misunderstanding relative to Carolina rigging; that everyone thinks traditional soft plastics float the hook and hover at rest. But when you pull most baits behind a weight, they drive down toward the bottom and then settle and die as you pause the retrieve. Oppositely, I look at the newer breed of buoyant superplastics as the perfect tools for rigs like a drop-shot or a Carolina because they rise and hover on the rig and almost fish themselves.”

To Browning’s point, if you put something like a Zoom Baby Brush Hog or Strike King Rage Craw behind a 3-foot mono or fluorocarbon leader and bullet sinker, the presentation largely resembles a creature bait crawling across bottom on a jighead. (At that point, why not just fish the more efficient jig?) Imagine the bullet sinker sliding across the sand or snaking through grass, water resistance and downward pressure on the line, driving the bait into the bottom. Even with slower retrieves, each pull on the sinker drives the bait deeper. And as Browning suggests, if the bait is made from traditional PVC plastisol, it sinks to the bottom and on the pause—regardless of hook choice—and gets lost in the substrate.

The “Rising” C-Rig

When I first considered throwing a Carolina rig decades ago, my motivation was to show bass a free-flowing, slower-moving morsel that hovered just above vegetation where it was highly visible. A suspending bait, I believed, would be compelling to bass in cool water, spring or fall. I also knew it would mimic a hovering preyfish if I deadsticked it for 10 to 30 seconds, occasionally twitching or swimming it—almost like fishing livebait.

This, predating the arrival of the first suspending, hard jerkbaits, we had at the time no real way to benefit from a hovering presentation. And as I put various worms, lizards, and other baits on a hook behind a Carolina, I discovered none of them “hovered” or suspended. Rather, each bait swam into the bottom and stayed there.

Having fished floating jigheads for walleyes for years, friends and I soon realized we could insert a floating jig into a hollow tube body and fish something that functioned much like a suspending jerkbait, even though the concept hardly yet existed.

Further, to achieve a measure of snag resistance, we lightly pierced the tube’s soft outer skin with the hook point, which still enabled solid hook-ups. The now-buoyant 3- to 4-inch tube trailed a 1/2- or 3/4-ounce bullet weight on a 24- to 36-inch 14-pound mono leader. In shallower water, the bait proved buoyant enough to ascend to and float on the surface. We learned to match leader length, relatively speaking, to the height of the aquatic vegetation. In low-growing sandgrass/chara, I might run a shorter 18-inch leader—always monofilament for its buoyancy—which allows the bait to suspend about a foot off bottom. Around lanky pondweed (cabbage), particularly along weededges from 8 to 20 feet deep, a 3- to 4-foot leader often shined. At times, for suspended smallmouths, I’ve run up to a 6-foot leader.

When fluorocarbon arrived on the scene, we experimented with 10- to 14-pound leaders. But I didn’t like the way its weight and sinking nature seemed to deaden the bait’s action. I recall initially using 17-pound-test mono as a mainline, later reconfiguring with 20-pound braid. My rod of choice has always been a 7-foot or 7-foot 4-inch medium-heavy-power, moderate-fast-action model. My current favorite, a 7-foot 3-inch Daiwa Tatula Elite (TTEL731MHFB) is an exceptional Carolina-rig rod. A faster 7:1 gear ratio, 200-size casting reel picks up slack line and long leaders fast—a must for this style of fishing.

While most anglers activate and retrieve their Carolina rigs with the rod tip, Browning relies on his 8.3:1 Lew’s Speed Spool casting reel, which he says picks up exactly 3 feet of line per revolution. “If you’re using the rod to retrieve your C-rig, each move of the rod tip drags the bait farther than you think, which can be a negative. It’s why I mostly use the reel, knowing that one turn of the handle moves the bait 3 feet. This means I can precisely creep it over cover and put the sinker and bait right where I want—within inches— which often makes a difference with a big fish and a small strike zone.”

Further, Browning uses a neutrally buoyant, relatively stretchy copolymer, such as Gamma Polyflex, for his leaders. Most anglers, including myself, who use mono or copolymer Carolina leaders do so because of their flotation, slight stretch, and shock absorption, particularly for long-sweeping hook-sets and when using a braided mainline.

That first fall with the “rising-rig,” friends and I surprised ourselves with more epic big bass days than we’d ever hoped for. Often, we were fishing the same popular, highly pressured weededges as everyone else, showing bass a different, though convincing decoy—the opposite of bottom-hugging Texas rigs and faster-moving search lures.

The rig allowed us to dissect each area, ultimately soaking baits in small, key zones—essentially an active deadstick approach—that continued enticing big bass after big bass. The high point happened late that September—around 1990—when I hooked a 9-pound bass from one little clear spot on an inside weedline.

The typical retrieve involved pulling and pausing the modified Carolina across broad plant-covered points, our weedless floating tubes gliding, slashing, or hovering, depending on rod movement and speed. When you popped the rod, the 90-degree jighead, which rode hook-down, would give the tube an active walk-the-dog-style slash. A slow drag retrieve created a rhythmic swim-wobble. On the pause, the bait would ascend until it reached its apex—a foot or more above bottom—buoyant mono leader trailing at a 45- to 60-degree angle.

Those first weeks of spring and again in fall—when water temps touched the 50°F range—almost every bite occurred during some portion of a 10- to 30-second pause, as the suspending tube slowly ascended and hovered in place. Many of the bites, often from 4-, 5-, and 6-pound largemouths, nearly snatched the rod out of our hands. The suspending Carolina was so good, in fact, that friends and I kept it under our hats for many years, frequently inducing two to three times more bites—and lots more big fish—than other anglers zoned on the same locations with other lures. Beyond a small circle a friends, this is the first time I’ve spoken of it to anyone.

Later, for several years after moving to Minnesota, I eventually stopped fishing the rig after pike pilfered most of my stash of floating jigheads. Since then, I’ve found that a few companies still offer oval-shaped floaters with 1/0 and #1 hooks. But apparently I was never alone in my line of thinking, for many anglers today fish a similar floating Carolina setup, replacing the floating jig with anything from a Styrofoam peanut to a foam earplug. Those little earplugs used for hearing protection slide right into hollow-bodied baits, compressing easily so as not to deform the bait and offering enough flotation to activate most tubes, even with a 2/0 to 4/0 offset wide-gap hook.

For best results, impale the earplug lengthwise onto the hook, sliding it down the shank, just before the bend. It’s also possible to push the plug into the bait behind the hook, though you’ll lose a lot of the little soft foam cylinders in the water—and they’re not biodegradable. Apparently, they taste okay, as my retriever seems to inhale them like treats whenever she finds one lying around.

The upshot is, a critical aspect of the presentation changes when you switch from the 90-degree, downward line tie of a floating jig to a traditional in-line eyelet of an offset hook. You largely lose the side-to-side darting, cutting action, unless you really give the bait a good rip, and that’s not particularly conducive to a Carolina, wherein the sinker absorbs much of the angler-applied energy, rather than the bait.

Carolina Jerkbait Combo

The last straw was when one company stopped making tubes in realistic baitfish profiles. At that point, I shifted my thinking toward what I was really trying to accomplish. Clearly, the hovering and suspending posture of a floating tube mimicked a baitfish rather than a crayfish, although the shape of standard cylindrical tubes seemed slightly off the mark. Yes, bass still bit them, but I felt I needed something that slashed and darted, while also looking the part of a baitfish.

The answer, of course, would have been a soft jerkbait or paddletail swimbait that moved like and visually resembled a shad, sunfish, or other piscine prey. The problem, initially, was that no one was yet making a soft, buoyant jerkbait. Then, a few years later, Strike King released its Z-Too Jerkbait—made with Z-Man’s buoyant ElaZtech material. Eventually, Z-Man released its own version, the Scented Jerk ShadZ, which is the same soft jerkbait I often use for C-rigging today. A newer soft, buoyant jerkbait I like is a 6-inch Z-Man DarterZ. Cut 2 inches off its head for a perfect minnow profile, with a segmented posterior and broad tail that make it plane, dart and glide in pronounced fashion. Smallmouths love it.

Combined with the soft, natural texture and inherent action, the buoyancy of these superplastics is powerful enough to float any standard hook. Simply Texpose the 4- or 5-inch Jerk ShadZ or shortened DarterZ on a 3/0 or 4/0 offset wide-gap hook, such as a Mustad Ultra Lock EWG. To increase buoyancy, stretch the Jerk ShadZ to shed some of its salt.

Two years ago, I started throwing the C-Jerk rig with a 3-foot leader for springtime smallmouth bass, largely in shallow locations I’d otherwise toss an X-Rap or a Lucky Craft Pointer. Results were promising, with the C-Jerk eliciting almost as many bites as the hard jerkbait, albeit without the faster-moving efficiency of the X-Rap. A clear line of demarcation began to emerge, however, as I worked the C-Jerk in 8- to 15-foot zones and ledges, just beyond the diving arc of most traditional hard jerkbaits. Further, the visual aid of forward-facing sonar allowed me to target smaller, deeper zones around boulders or tufts of pondweed, darting, hovering, and saturating the fish zone with the soft Jerk ShadZ for as long as it takes, vis-à-vis livebait.  

Activating the bait behind an 18- to 36-inch 12-pound mono leader requires short, rapid rod twitches—pop, pop, pop, pause—followed by a brief rest phase to let the bait rise and hover. Practice it boatside to observe bait reactions to various rod moves, and your mental lightbulb will ignite. Done right, with the rod tip pointed slightly down, the Jerk ShadZ should shimmy and dart off to the side with each subsequent rod twitch, jumping back and forth in short or more protracted glides. The downward rod angle also keeps the sinker on bottom, where it won’t jump and potentially spook fish.

At full stop, the bait sits head slightly down, tail up, which perhaps mimics a baitfish preoccupied in its own feeding behavior. Almost all bites happen either just after the bait darts and stops, or at rest (the rod loads as you commence the next pop.) The rise and hover portion of the presentation, in my eyes, completely rejuvenates an otherwise unexciting Carolina rig. As such, I feel fully confident, at times, simply working the bait a few feet before stopping and letting it soak in place for 10 to 20 seconds. It’s an exceptional tool for casting at targets with live sonar. And again, so many bass bite it during the pause that the presentation begins to feel like fishing livebait.

Carolina Finesse

The other key takeaway is that with buoyant superplastics, you can open all kinds of creative doors. Beyond traditional Carolina baits like the Baby Brush Hog, consider a buoyant Z-Man LizardZ, which Browning calls an underutilized Carolina killer. Other key floaters include the 13 Fishing Blunt Force Finesse Worm, Gambler Floating Worm, or Damiki Air Craw. At nearly every stop on the Bass Pro Tour, Browning has at least one Carolina rod on deck, rigged with a 4-inch Billy GOAT, whose twin kicker tails can be made to resemble shad, or even a darting crayfish.

While Carolina-rigging remains ripe for experimentation with lighter lines, sinkers, and smaller baits—especially for clear water—I’ve never otherwise heard the terms finesse and Carolina enter the same sentence. Certainly, you can achieve a similar off-bottom presentation with a drop-shot. But as smallmouths continue to be subjected to and saturated with this configuration and its subsequent, increasingly familiar bait movements, a finesse Carolina trick can be devastatingly effective.

Across deep, clear-water structure—where other anglers throw a drop-shot—I’ve been pulling an 8-pound-test copolymer leader with a 1/8- or 1/16-ounce tungsten weight, micro ‘ant’ swivel, and a finesse swimbait like a 3-inch Z-Man Slim SwimZ or a 4-inch Finesse ShadZ shad-shaped worm.

Last fall, I dug into my JDM (Japanese Domestic Market) bag and found the Lucky John Unagi Slug, which proved to be an excellent, buoyant C-finesse bait. This little segmented worm/swimbait hybrid creeps along, juking, and darting with super subtle tail kicks. I’ve also C-rigged the Savage Gear Ned Salamander with some promising results. Stretch the bait to shed salt and increase buoyancy, as needed.

“We still call it the old ball and chain,” Browning says. “Back in the day, it was always one of my go-to rigs, anytime I needed a big bass. It’s certainly fallen out of favor in recent seasons. But with the return of (MLF) tournament formats favoring 5-fish limits of big bass, I’ll be slinging a Carolina rig a whole lot more. Especially now, as the new generation of superplastics gives you that all-important swim, rise, and hover.”

---

In-Fisherman Field Editor Cory Schmidt, an exceptional multispecies angler, has been writing for all In-Fisherman publications for going on 30 years.

---