River Lakes Bassin: Lake Havasu

Monday, December 1, 2014

5 Cool Tricks with a Tube Bait

Tube Baits may be one of the best baits for catching big smallmouth and largemouth bass. Here are five simple little tricks we used this summer to put bass in the boat.

The tube can be as simple or as complicated as you want to make it. It has thousands of uses. Tactics that work for a tube include drifting, gliding, vertical jigging, flipping, pitching, dragging... You get the picture. Even with all those techniques and options it isn't without its flaws. An exposed hook on a tube jig has the potential to snag when drifting or dragging. A texas rigged tube has problems hooking a fish due to the way the tube is designed. Suspended fish won't leave their mid water position to hit a bottom dragged tube. Once again you get it.

So after a long summer of using a tube here are some tricks we used to catch bass with the tube.

Stuff your Tube Jigs with Sponge and Add Scent

Early on I was having trouble with fish biting and dropping the tube and me missing the fish while I was drifting or dragging the bait. Part of this could be me not paying attention, but lets blame the bait. I would add scent to the bait hoping to get fish to hold longer but it would disperse right away. The cure for instant dispersion was adding a chunk of sponge by running the hook through a small chunk of everyday sponge and inserting it inside the tube. I than used which ever scent I was using that day, usually Yum!, and was able to give myself a few more seconds to set the hook.

Add a Rattle

Adding a little bit of noise to your tube presentation can really improve a fishes ability to find your bait when its on the bottom crawling like a crayfish. Many manufactures right now make tube jigs that have rattles attached. My best advice with rattles is to expirement and let the bass tell you what they want. Some days were better for rattles than others.

Stroke it and Get a Reaction Strike

Somewhere around July I discovered stroking a football jig. I was getting frustrated looking down on my electronics seeing fish suspended two or three feet from the bottom and not eating my drop shot. What I found was I could stroke a football jig up into those fish and get them to react. So one day when the wind was blowing and I was drifting a hump in about 20 feet of water I noticed once again the bass were suspended at about three feet. I immediately began stroking the tube and put five fish in the boat in five casts! Stroking is no more than pulling the bait off the bottom and repeating the motion two or three time before letting it hit the bottom again. The fish react to the quick upward motion and hit it usually on the fall. Rattles really help here because when the bait lands it sets the rattles off.

Use the Tube as a Spinnerbait Skirt

I laughed when I first heard of this. I thought why would a fish ever hit this? Then one day I wanted to down size a spinnerbait and was pleasantly surprised when I used a tube to do so. The trick here is to get the tube over the head of the spinnerbait so all that is exposed is hook and tube. A good pair of bait scissors and super glue will do the job.

Cut the Bait for the Texas Rig

This summer I rarely Texas Rigged the tube since I wasn't doing a lot of flipping but a pretty cool litte trick I learned for Texas Rigging a tube was cutting a slit in the back of the tube and then Texposing the hook. See pictures below.

Those are five of my favorite Tricks to do with a Tube Bait. There are thousands of things an angler can do with these super versitile baits! What are some things you do with your tubes? Let us know in the comments and be sure to like us on Facebook!

Wednesday, September 17, 2014

The Fluorocarbon-Braid Connection

For us Bass Anglers it has been a long hot summer. Most of us were on the water before the sun came up every morning just so we could enjoy a few hours during the day where the sun wasn’t blazing down on us. With days like that the fish usually go deep and can become sluggish. For us out here on the Colorado River Lakes we’ve had to employ mostly finesse fishing tactics and rigs in order to put fish in the boat. Rigs like the drop shot and tube jig.

Finesse fishing requires an extreme degree of sensitivity because most fish don’t hit these baits hard like they would a crankbait, spinnerbait or even a topwater. They simply put the bait in their mouth. By using braided line with a fluorocarbon leader both the drop shot and tube jig you not only have the sensitivity that braid gives but you get the near invisibility under water that fluorocarbon provides. You’re winning on both fronts!

But most anglers are very weary when it comes to tying line directly to line. I’ve even heard of one pro being “sketched” out by it. Well this really isn’t as big of a deal as some anglers make it. I use one knot for my Braid-Fluorocarbon connection and it has suited me well to this day. That knot is the double uni knot.

As you can see from the illustration above, it is a very simple knot to tie. In fact I’m sure it was a third grader who not only tied the knot above but then illustrated it so his Mom could put it on the door of the family refrigerator.

Here is some advice on this knot: Trust it. It’s going to hold because it like most knots we tie is what is called a self-cinching knot. As a fish pulls against you, the knot only gets tighter. When you perform the wraps on the knot be sure to wrap six to eight times erring on the side of more wraps. I’ve only had the knot break once all summer and that was because I wrapped both types of line only 5 times a piece because I was in a hurry to get back to fishing after I lost my hook and weight on drop shot rig to an underwater brush pile that was holding Smallmouth.

That brings be to my final piece of advice on this knot. Don’t get in a hurry while tying it. Dress it up pretty before pulling it tight or the line will cross itself and break itself, which is most likely what happened in the above story.

This combination provides a serious amount of feel to the angler and you can enjoy knot strength of 85% to 100% if tied correctly. As always thanks for stopping by and reading and remember while fishing our beautiful gin-clear lakes practice CPR. Catch, Photograph and Release.

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