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Chalk Talk: Monroe discusses creature baits

Chalk Talk: Monroe discusses creature baits

(Editor's note: The following is the latest installment in a series of fishing tips presented by The Bass University. Check back each Friday for a new tip.)

Ish Monroe is a flipping machine, and he loves to drop bombs with a Missile Baits D Bomb, but he knows that creature baits have far wider applications than just behind a big hunk of tungsten. There are “a hundred million creature baits out there,” he said, and while he generally limits his choices to four different styles, he doesn’t limit how he uses them.

Of course, the most popular is the Texas rig, but he also likes to Carolina-rig them, fish them on a wobblehead, use them as trailers and – when forced to do so – lace them on a shaky-head. He determines which soft plastic to use by the amount of action it creates.

The biggest tournament limit of his life came not with a flipping stick, but rather on the end of a Carolina rig at Falcon Lake. He knows there are times when the “ball and chain” will outfish anything else. He favors a 7’2” to 7’6” medium-heavy graphite rod with a main line composed of braid and a fluorocarbon leader. The combination provides “so much sensitivity” while allowing his bait to ride in the perfect middle zone, not on the bottom while not too high, either. He likes a Missile Baits D Stroyer for this application because it has “the most action.” He tailors his leader length to the lure he’s using. “The bigger the bait, the longer the leader.”

On a wobblehead, his first choice is typically a crawdad-style bait with a lot of kicking action like the Missile Baits Craw Father. “I don’t drag it, I wind it,” he said. “The wobblehead to me is a great search bait.”

While he only uses finesse techniques as a last resort, there are times when a shaky-head gets the call, and in that case he’s likely to thread a Missile Craw on it to keep with the “all-finesse” theme. “I just want it to kind of be there,” he said.

He’ll also use them as trailers on flipping jigs, football jigs and bladed jigs, matching the colors as precisely as possible. He likes the Craw Father when he wants to create a subtle presentation and a D Bomb when he wants to generate a lot of action.

No matter which creature bait you’re using, he suggests that you really only need two colors to be successful. “There’s not one lake in the country that you go to where a creature bait in black and blue or green-pumpkin will not work,” he said definitively.

He’s also picky about the hooks he uses, avoiding EWG and offset models where possible, even though they make it easier to rig a bait neatly. “Ninety-five percent of the time, the hook I use out there is a straight-shank hook” tied on with a snell knot, he said, which maximizes his hook-up ratio. When punching grass, he’ll peg his sinker, but when just utilizing a standard Texas rig he doesn’t peg. That enables him to get more bites and land more fish, a lesson he learned early in his career from Denny Brauer.

If you want to learn some of Monroe's creature bait lessons, including the third color pattern he often uses, especially when bluegills are around, check out his full video, available only by subscribing to The Bass University TV.

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