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Two "Heavy Fixes" for a Broken Bite
By Jerry Puckett

Sept/Oct 1997

As your partner backs you and your metal flake monster smoothly into the inky blackness of pre-dawn Saturday, you can hardly wait for blast-off. You’ve got a good draw for the annual end-of-the-season club finale and the bite is on. Working the sunken edges of flooded cover with the ol’ trusty spinnerbait during pre-fish you were able to put together a solid pattern, not kickers, but quality fish, good for a top finish and with a couple of big bites, who knows?

Fast forward two hours and review the tape. Remember, there you were slammin’ the spinnerbait rod back into the rod locker and looking to the heavens in disgust. What went wrong and why me? Well, one clue may be that bluebird sky without a cloud in sight. Yeah’, the last couple of weekends did have a mild frontal activity with a little overcast and breeze and the barometer was on the rise this morning. No use crying over spilt bass so to speak. May as well cowboy up, regroup and try to salvage the day. No pouting.

When it’s time to put your head down and go to work there’s no better tool than a heavy jig, and I suggest a real heavy-weight, something between 5/8 and 1 ounce. For the moment, it’s time to forget the Fall and concentrate on Winter, they aren’t coming to you so you’ll have to take it to them and the key will be contact, structure bumpin’ contact.

One thing’s for sure, the bass are still in the general area, they didn’t hop a fast freight for Florida since yesterday, so resist the urge to run and gun. You know where they were, we need to find where they are and what gear they’re in. For lack of better terms I class the fish as positive, neutral or negative on any given day. In the hopes that yesterday’s positive fish simply went neutral, you might choose a heavy Carolina-rigged worm, worked steadily but quickly on minor drops or ledges just outside the flooded cover that the positive fish were on yesterday. The worm would be a good choice but my top pick is a one-ton (one-ounce) jig rigged with a full skirt and double-tailed grub, just perfect for tight line sliding in the 15 to 40 foot range.

The Yamamoto football head is designed specifically for this duty with molded recesses on the hook shank to securely hold the full skirt and a truncated cone to keep the grub tightly seated. (Okay, so that was a brief commercial message, you caught me, big deal.) In the basically clear western waters I like to mix and match colors. I often choose a skirt in a muted green (11-20-140) or bronze (11-20-200) and pair it with an up-sized twin tail in melon pepper (12-10-140) or dark pumpkin (12-10-286). Typically I have these combinations juiced up and soaking in Yamamoto attractant, ready for duty. Add a stout rod (Mod IV), fast retrieve reel spooled with 14 or 16 pound test and we’re ready to go tight line slidin’ the one ton jig.

Again, we’re looking for neutral fish now. They’ve moved off the cover and dropped down a few feet; they will bite but, they may not chase. We’ll use the slidin’ technique to absolutely vacuum the offshore area. Positioning the boat 30 or 40 feet outside our primary cover (depending on the amount of slope) we begin a series of quartering casts just outside the cover. The trick is to balance the speed of the boat with the slope of the bottom.

Our goal is to have the heavy jig slide down the slope, bumping and banging the structure but never stopping its progress. Perfection is when the heavy weight bait touches every base on its trip to 30 or 40 feet of water at which point it’s directly under the boat and still in contact with the bottom. The steady movement of the boat sorta "snuck up" on the bait as it slid down the sloping structure.

Keeping in mind the neutral (we hope) mood of the fish we key on any change in the feel of the bait. This is where the low-stretch, highly sensitive Sugoi line comes into play, telegraphing the difference between the sharp contact with rock or wood and the typically mushy or "weighting" sensation of a bite. Rather than attack the bait, the fish seem to simply eat it with a minimum of transmitted shock. At times the only hint of a bite will be the sensation that the one-ounce bait has gotten lighter.

When you detect even a small change in the feel of the bait a sharp snap of the wrist is usually sufficient to penetrate the hook. Once the rod is loaded it seems best to be patient and let the fish fight the power of the rod. Rushing a green fish to the surface seems to add to the number of "shake offs" or dumped fish. If they’ll stay down, let ‘em. But, the very instant you sense that the fish is headed up you’ve got to get busy. This is where the high speed reel really shines. Essentially it’s a foot race for the surface. If the fish arrives at the surface with any slack in the line it’s usually all over. A head-shaking fish using a one-ounce bait for leverage usually wins the battle. Darn, shoulda, coulda, woulda.

What If It Doesn’t Work?

Whoops, looks like the fish passed up neutral on the way to negative city. If after an hour of tight line slidin’ the jig you’re still not bit it’s time to go to phase two, the Roosevelt Drag.

I was first introduced to this method during just such a no-bite situation on Arizona’s Lake Roosevelt. My pre-fish crankbait pattern had gone up in smoke but my draw partner for the day had an ace up the old sleeve. He moved us well off shore into about 40 feet of water outside the same area where the crankbait fish had been more than willing during pre-fish. The electronics painted a rather featureless flat with only the occasional smallish mound of rock or wood cover. We didn’t even mark a fish above the bottom although there were a few suspicious looking humps on the bottom.

My partner rigged up just like he was going to tight line slide the one-ton, heavy rod and line, one ounce football head (it was the first one I’d ever seen at the time) and a big Hula Grub. These days I’d opt for the full skirt/jumbo twin-tail rig (12 series) we use for slidin’ or one of the new up-sized Hula Grubs (99 series).

I could hardly believe the presentation we used on Roosevelt that day. I’d never seen anything like it but man, how it worked. My partner dropped his jig until it hit bottom, directly below his horizontal rod tip. He engaged his reel and then just sat there as the light breeze moved the boat almost imperceptibly across the surface. No jiggin’, no hopping, no shaking. He just sat there and dragged the darn thing across the bottom.

Unless it was necessary to jiggle the rod tip to clear an obstacle he imparted absolutely no action what-so-ever. He did nothing, that is, until he turned slightly as if to follow the bait and with a grunt, set the hook on a fish over two pounds. These days that would be a slot fish, but in the pre-slot days on Roosevelt that two-and-a-half was a kicker. Suffice it to say, that afternoon I became a believer. In the right situation the "Roosevelt Drag" was, and is, dynamite.

Apparently the slow drag was precisely the presentation for frustrating the inactive bass, maddening them past the point of no return. My partner’s analysis held that the key to the bite was the combination of the heavy jig grating against rock and gravel combined with the silt trail thrown up by the lazy passage of the bait.

I don’t guess any of us would look forward to a fizzled reaction bite and we certainly dread the thought of the fish shifting gears from positive to neutral or (God forbid) negative, but, it doesn’t have to be a dead-end situation. If you ever find yourself confronted with these situations, particularly with something more on the line than just your fragile ego, take heart. It’s doubtful that your fish left the territory, more likely that they simply made a shift in gears. If you can manage to shift with ‘em you may be in for a treat. A big sack of bass while most others are making that lonesome "short sack" walk to the scales.

So much is made of scents and attractants that one has to occasionally step back and ask, "How much of this is really necessary?" If you listen to all the hype the "infomercial" dudes are putting out it would seem that if you fail to add scent with your injector or pre-mix oil you’re failing to set the table for the big bite via that sweet smelling fish-attracting exhaust of success. Garbage.

You know as well as we do that on those banner days when you simply can’t keep the fish out of the boat, when the fish attack the jig with careless abandon, the value of a scent product is limited. It certainly doesn’t hurt but the difference it makes may be small indeed. Of course, if the bite was always that hot most of us would lose interest quickly.

But on the tough bite days, when the fish are neutral or (horrors) negative one bite can spell the difference. Particularly when deep jigging (tough at times for all of us) we do everything we can in an attempt to tilt the odds in our favor. This is the situation when we believe scent is very important. With a bait 30 or 40 feet under the boat a period of only a second is an eternity when we’re trying to sense a pick-up. Combing the Yamamoto scent (no, it’s not the only one that works but we like it best) with a bait that incorporates a soft texture and heavy salt load covers all the bases.

The most important by-product of this bait and scent combination is confidence, your confidence. When you have proved to your own satisfaction that the fish will not spit the bait you can proceed in an orderly fashion to do your job - you’ve still gotta land ‘em.

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