12 Ways To Fish A Worm
Part Two – Smile Blades, Weighted Hooks, Inline Spinners and Trick Worms
August 17, 2009
There are times when you need to fish through the water column but you want a bit more subtlety than you’d get from a rattle bait or a big flashy spinnerbait. Or you may need a big lure that will penetrate weeds or thick submerged brush. A swimming worm can be fished at any depth and if you rig it right you can get it through just about any cover. You can add a little flash to it or rig it so it performs erratically. A swimming worm can be fished slowly to probe thick cover or it can be retrieved briskly in open water to attract bass that are up feeding.
Most of the time you want to choose a worm with a ribbon tail for swimming – that supple tail will flutter beautifully as the worm swims through the water. An added bonus: the thin ribbon tail can add a lot to the size of the bait without adding weight.
Smile Blades
You may not be familiar with Smile Blades, but they are a staple in Yamamoto Pro Stan Fagerstrom’s tackle box. Fagerstrom has been fooling bass for decades, so he knows what to do when the fishing gets tough. “When you think you're trolling slow, slow down some more and you will catch fish,” says Fagerstrom. “Smile Blades provide life-like action even at 1/4 mph, and they are easy to tune.” When the temperature drops and the fish get sluggish, Smile Blades can save the day.
Smile Blade are made of lightweight Mylar plastic and they have a hole in the center. To rig them, all you have to do is slide a couple of beads on the line behind them. Some people like to have the blade directly in front of the bait, but you can also rig it with the blade further out or even combine two or more blades. Just use a bobber stopper or peg a bead anywhere on the line. Stan suggests using a wide blade angle for a slow rolling wobble or narrow blade angle for a faster shake and spin.
“The blades give the worms a seductive wiggle fish just can’t resist,” says Fagerstrom. He says that they are especially popular on lakes that get a lot of fishing pressure. Smile blades come in six sizes from less than an inch to over three inches, and are available in over thirty color patterns. They’re only about three bucks a package, so you’ve got no excuses – give them a try.
Inline Spinners
Not all inline spinners are tiny trout lures with treble hooks. You can get some hefty blades with nice worm hooks and weights big enough to get them down to where the big girls live. Rig a worm on one of these bad boys and you’ll discover a whole new world of bass fishing.
Smallmouth bass are particularly susceptible to worms with a little bling. Rig a worm on an inline spinner and you can fish it quickly over a flat, but you can also change the speed and depth easily, making your worm even more effective. Try letting the lure bump the rocks and bounce off structure. Another great way to fish a worm on an inline spinner is to simply let it fall next to submerged trees, rocks, pilings, etc. The blade will helicopter and add flash and a thump to the natural sinuous movements of the worm.
One of the things that make inline spinners so great for bass is the way they can achieve almost neutral buoyancy – the spinning blade keeps the lure from falling too fast, so the lure can almost hover in place when fished vertically.
Another ideal situation for a worm on an inline spinner is weedy places. Because the blade spins on its axis ahead of the worm it tends to clear a path for the hook and bait, making it much easier to work through stuff like eelgrass and milfoil. Try tossing one out past lily pads. Let it sink, then work it back under the pads. If you’re fishing heavy weeds, you’ll want to use braid and good stout gear.
You can adapt musky and pike baits for bass, or just get a handful of Terminator weedless inline spinners. Terminator's titanium frame can take the heat no matter how big a bass you hook. The nickel-and gold-plated bullets are the perfect shape and weight for retrieving through weeds, and the blades give you lots of flash.
Weighted Hooks
Putting the weight on the hook itself instead of on the line in front of the hook may seem like a minor change at first glance, but if you want to swim a worm, a weighted hook is ideal. If you have a bullet sinker in front of a worm, the worm is going to fall headfirst when you stop the bait. With the weight on the keel, the whole rig swims more naturally, and when you stop the retrieve the worm glides forward and down.
A worm on a weighted hook is ideal for bass that are suspended in deep timber or hanging around deep weedlines. Fluorocarbon line helps get the lure down even with a very light weight on the hook. The only problem with this rig is that the knot can get hung up in weeds. You can try to rig it so that the eye and knot are inside the worm, but it almost always slips down and rips up the worm. The best solution is the Yamamoto 70 series Grub Guard. It’s a little plastic cone that fits over the knot to give your whole rig a smooth profile that slips easily through weeds and muck without getting fouled. Comes in a ton of colors, too.
Out west in our deep clear water, Nitro Pro Gary Senft has had great results with worms on weighted hooks no matter where he fishes them. They are perfect for swimming through submerged trees when the water is up, but they also do a great job when you let them sink down deep and swim them slowly through deep channels and around underwater structure. For night fishing, use a very lightly weighted hook and swim the worm just under the surface. Fish will see the worm’s silhouette against the sky as they look up. Dark worms and monofilament line are best for this nighttime technique.
Trick Worm!
What the heck is a trick worm, anyway? It’s just a worm that floats. The original trick worms were super floaters – worms made with a lot of air incorporated into the plastic. They came in sort of strange colors like bubble gum, black and yellow stripes and an odd purple with white or red stripes. Trick worms are fantastic, subtle topwater lures. Obviously you rig them weightless for topwater fishing, and you can work them over or through just about anything on or sticking out of the water.
There are now a lot of different kinds of floating worms and people use them for much more than just topwater fishing. A Carolina-rigged floater is deadly on deepwater bass and suspended fish. A floater on a jig head will stand up like a crawdad when the weight is on the bottom – we used to slice the end of a super floater down the middle to simulate the two pinchers of a craw, then drag it around the bottom for big bass. It even works at night.
Put a floating worm on a small pea head jig with the hook exposed and you’ve got a dynamite lure for rip rap. Fish it on spinning gear. Just cast it out and let it fall until your line goes slack, then reel until the line is taut. Shake it a couple of times, then hop it down the bank just a bit. Reel again. If it feels heavy, you’ve got a fish. Honestly, this is a fun and easy way to fish a rocky bank. It doesn’t work too well if there are weeds or a lot of stick-ups, but in open water it’s hard to beat. You can really cover some water with it, too. This technique has saved my butt in many a tournament. Try it!
There must be thousands of different styles, colors, sizes and types of plastic worms on the market. Multiply that by different rigging techniques, then factor in all the things (Smile Blades, Grub Guards, and inline blades) that you can add to the worms, and you can quickly come to the conclusion that there is absolutely no limit to the number of presentations you can make with plastic worms. You’d be right – and the next part of this four-part series will introduce you to even more great ways to fish plastic worms.