Wacky-rigged, weightless Senko gets finicky bass to bite
After fishing the first dawn hour for the frog bite, it was time to target something else. The sun had broken through the fog and was over the trees on the bank.
It was warming things quickly, and, quite frankly, we were happy to see its rays hitting the water. We needed help.
Sure, we had bass make runs at our frogs. But they were timid and only one of the seven strikes produced a hookup, and it didn’t end well for my partner, Dan Smith of Ridgeland.
“They don’t seem to want it,” he said after the final miss. “It’s gotten their attention, but apparently not their desire. Maybe they fed all night under the full moon.”
We were fishing a 50-acre private lake in Central Mississippi that we had fished on numerous occasions. We were aware of all of its cover and structure, and there is a lot of it, shallow, deep and in between.
“Let’s switch to soft plastics and hit the wood,” I suggested and we spent the next few minutes rigging for the change.
Smith went for his favorite, a 12-inch black and blue worm to get the attention of the lake’s plentiful big bass.
Remembering the timid strikes on the frog, I went in a totally different direction. I rigged a Senko worm, weightless and wacky-style, on a small Gamakatsu 2/0 finesse hook.
“Looks like we’re gonna have a contest,” I told my partner. “May the best rig win.”
We started out in the cover in the intermediate depth, targeting brush piles anywhere from 5 to 8 feet of water. Smith caught one, a 5-pounder that inhaled the big worm. I broke off a good fish, deep in the heart of a top.
After 30 minutes and that one fish, we made a move. We went to the deeper cover, 10 to 14 feet, and tried again. Thirty fish-less minutes later, we made a final move.
“They’re not deep and they don’t appear to be at the medium level, so let’s go shallow,” Smith said, and he moved the boat toward a row of brush in 5 and 6 feet of water about 20 yards off a long straight bank. Between the brush and the bank was an old ditch channel that offered a deep retreat.
The bites immediately increased and we both put fish in the boat at an equal rate, but the fish were smaller, 2 and 3 pounds. We played with them an hour and by then the sun was high and bright on the blue sky.
Wanting the big bites, we made one final move — shallow.
And, buddy, it was on. On every piece of cover we could find in 3 to 5 feet of water, we caught bass, with the majority of them the size we were seeking.
So, which worm won?
For both numbers and size, it was the finesse rig. The slow-falling dead stick Senko not only got more bites but also got the bigger fish that didn’t seem to be as aggressive as their smaller relatives.
“Every time I drag that wacky rig over a log and let it fall, it’s getting hammered,” I told Smith, who still caught a few. “I think the bass that were timidly striking the frogs earlier on the banks just moved out to the shallow cover and brought their lethargic attitude with them.”
Smith did eventually win a lunker with the 12-inch worm, yanking a 6½-pounder out of a spot where I had just caught a 5 pounder. It was our last cast, because my partner had a deer camp workday that afternoon.
Discussing it later with biologists and other bass fishermen, we concluded that a low level of dissolved oxygen in the deep water had pushed the big bass shallow, and because they didn’t want to be there, the bass were timid in their approach to lures. The finesse- and wacky-rigged Senko was the ticket to getting their attention.
I just hope they’re still there Saturday morning.
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