Weedless & weightless
It’s the quiet and subtle approach for catching bass from snaggy ground
Catching bass among the snags.
F irst light rears its head over the most perfect, shallow, rocky, weed-strewn ground you can imagine for bass fishing. The water is calm and clear, and the hunch you can’t ignore is that this is exactly the right situation for fishing with soft plastics rigged weedless and weightless – the quiet, subtle approach, to go with location and conditions.
You clip on your lure, launch it out there, and then start to deftly fish it back with a simple ‘twitch, twitch, pause, reel a bit’ sort of retrieve. A few casts later there is a hard tap on your rod tip. Twitch the weedless/ weightless rigged soft plastic once more and then everything goes tight and your rod tip slams around. Bass on!
Hang on a minute – what are you on about? How do you cast a weightless lure in the first place, and what do you really mean by the word weedless? Surely a weightless lure isn’t going to cast very well, and surely it’s impossible for any lure not to pick up bits of weed suspended in the water?
Here, we are going to get to the bottom of this weedless and weightless thing, and I am going to tell you, firstly, what these words actually mean in a lure fishing context, and secondly, how lethal it can sometimes be bass fishing like this.
DEFINITIONS
The definition of weightless may be obvious to some, but I have been contacted numerous times by anglers asking how to cast a weightless soft plastic lure.
What it means in a fishing context is very easy; it’s nothing more than a soft plastic lure,
to which we are adding no extra weight.
Something like a Texas rig for wrasse fishing requires the use of a ball or cone lead in front of the soft plastic, or swimming a paddletail nice and shallow often works better with a small belly-weight on the hook to keep it stable. We don’t want any of that for this style of lure fishing because we are relying purely on the weight of the soft plastic to help us cast it out and fish with it. That’s what is known as fishing it ‘naked’ with no added weight, hence weightless.
As for weedless, well, if you put a lure with a hook on it into the sea then it will pick up bits of weed if they are suspended in the water. What I am on about here is how the design of the (weedless) hook helps you with fishing the soft plastic lure through and around heavy (weed) cover without it snagging very much – unlike, say, a hard lure with multiple sets of trebles.
The point on a weedless hook is bent down to stop it standing proud and snagging everything. Although that hookpoint is not standing proud, like on a regular J-hook, a weedless hook takes fish just as well as a more normal hook.
By combining those two words, it should now make perfect sense. Let’s say I am rigging a 6in OSP DoLive Stick weedless/weightless – all I am doing is taking a lure out of the packet and rigging it on a weedless hook with no extra weight anywhere. I am going to cast it out and fish with it just like this, and I don’t have to avoid fishing certain areas for fear of snagging it; indeed, this is often where the bass like to hide.
Weedless/weightless, or weedless and weightless – arguably a confusing way to describe how we are going to fish here, but now you understand the terms, let’s understand more about when and where to fish with lures rigged in this way.
SUBTLE FISHING
Think about one word above all others here – subtle. We are going for a very different approach to when we might need to bang very ‘grippy’ hard lures out into a rough sea and a strong headwind, or put soft plastics rigged on jig heads out into a run of current to bump them along the bottom.
For the most part, I am going to fish soft plastics rigged weedless and weightless in calmer, clearer conditions over generally pretty shallow ground – the sort of time when a great big hard lure landing noisily might spook feeding bass. We want to be nice and quiet, so be careful with where you wade and think stealthy all the time.
Aside from fly-fishing, putting soft plastics out there like this is about as subtle as fishing for bass is going to get. While these magnificent predators are perfectly at home in rough seas, there are also times when they will hunt the quiet areas in calm conditions.
The whole crux to this style of bass fishing is feel and touch – the connection between your lure fishing rod and your lure. The more you can feel what is going on, the more connected you are to your lure and what is going on with it.
Sure, there are times when your feel is drastically reduced. This is mainly down to crosswinds that grab your braid and reduce that tight connection between you and lure. The main feel, as such, that we are seeking is a bass hitting your lure, and then knowing either when to strike or when to keep moving the lure to keep the bass coming at you.
Don’t be tempted to use heavy, really powerful spinning rods. They are tiring to hold and fish with for long periods, and the tip doesn’t respond directly to the movements you might or might not be imparting to the lure.