Justin Giles and his fishing partners were really working hard to find the bass and draw a strike during a hot summer trip last year. With temperatures in the 90s and the sun high in the sky, the bass were seemingly nowhere to be found.
So Giles picked up his finesse rig and went to work with his version of the shaky rig, which changes depending upon the conditions.
“I like to use the Strike King shaky heads with a Strike King Super Finesse Worm because they float straight up,” Giles said. “If you can put that thing in front of a bass he’ll usually bite it.”
As Giles worked the shaky rig around submerged stumps and brush tops along an old pond dam and creek channel, he drew a few strikes and caught a bass — but the bite was really tough.
The bass were just mouthing the shaky rig and not even moving.
“I couldn’t feel them strike; something just didn’t feel right, or maybe there was just a little tension on the line and I couldn’t feel the worm,” he said. “Almost every time that happens you need to set the hook, and you’ll usually have a bass on the other end.
“It’s an excellent hot weather bait, and the bass will strike it when they won’t touch anything else.”
This angler has his favorite target when the heat ramps up during the summer.
“The shaky rigs work anywhere, but they’re really deadly when you find a school of bass holding on top of or on the side of a ledge,” Giles said. “If they’re not actively, feeding I’ll bounce the shaky rig up and down on the ledge and draw a strike a lot of times.
“And once you find them and catch one, just slow down and work the area around there very slow because there’s usually more bass in the vicinity, as they travel in schools in deep water.”
Giles likes to fish crankbaits and a variety of lures when trying to get reaction bites and catch stubborn hot-weather bass, but will employ his shaky rig with a variety of plastics and colors when the bite is super-tough.
“I’ll concentrate on fishing ledges during hot weather, especially when the sun is high and it’s a bright and sunny day,” Giles said. “That usually puts the bass tight to that ledge and structure, if there’s any in the vicinity. And sometimes they will move up on the ledges and feed once the sun starts going down and it cools off.”
During one hot summer afternoon, I joined Giles on just such a ledge-fishing outing where we only caught a few bass on the lake during the hot afternoon.
As thunderstorms boomed just to our north, a cool breeze swept through the air and the sun sunk lower in the west — and Giles had a hunch that turned our day around.
“Let’s try that ledge one more time before we head to the landing,” he said.
As we pulled up to the ledge the young angler pitched a shaky rig on top of the shelf and moved it just slightly before reeling up the slack and setting the hook on a good 3 ½-pounder.
The two other anglers on either side of Giles cast up onto the ledge, and in seconds all three had bass on at once.
Over the next hour and a half, we caught or drew strikes almost every other cast, and had on many doubles.
The later it got the bigger the bass, with several in the 4- to 6-pound range and a couple pushing 8 pounds.
The bass had obviously turned on and moved up onto the ledge and started a feeding frenzy, and we were happy to oblige them with easy pickings.
“Normally I’ll fish 10- or 12-pound fluorocarbon, but depending upon the area I’m fishing I may use 15-pound fluorocarbon when there’s a lot of structure there,” Giles said. “I’m going to use as light a rig and line as I can get by with because the lighter the line the more bites I get when the bass are finicky.”
The Mississippi State University engineering student sticks with three basic colors when targeting bass on his shaky rig: june bug, watermelon and pumpkin green.
In addition to the Strike King worms, he also uses the Net Bait T-Mac and Zoom Finesses Worms on shaky head rigs with great success.
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