.(Editor's note: The following is the sixth in a series of fishing tips presented by The Bass University. Check back each Friday for a new tip.)
There are few serious bass anglers who haven’t used a dropshot and a shaky-head to fill out their limits when times get tough. They’re both finesse techniques, both use similar ranges of soft plastics and they can both load the livewell, but Virginia pro John Crews approaches them very differently.
He agrees that neither is typically the best way to locate a winning school of fish, but they’re good after you find them and want to “clean up the crumbs.” The shaky-head in particular, he said, is “a vacuum cleaner bait.” Once you’ve caught a few on a more aggressive lure, go back through the area with a little worm and you can box the holdovers.
The differences start with his tackle. For both he likes a size 40 spinning reel, but after that the paths diverge. For shaky-heading, he prefers a shorter rod, usually a 6'8" Cashion stick, and usually slightly stiffer “because you’re actually setting the hook through the worm.” He rigs it 90 percent of the time with 8-pound Vicious Pro Elite fluorocarbon.
For the shaky-head, he’s more likely to start with 6-pound line. “It has nothing to do with the fish seeing the line,” he said, and everything to do with the action of the lure. In order to handle big fish on that light line, he uses a longer rod, a Cashion in the 7’2” range. That enables him to fight the fish with the rod, not the line. “It absorbs those head shakes better,” he said.
For shaky-heads, he uses his Missile Baits Warlock heads, typically either 1/8-, 3/16- oor 1/4-ounce for finesse fishing – he can fish all the way down to 30 feet comfortably with a quarter-ouncer – and he likes a straight-tailed worm for the vast majority of fishing. With a dropshot, he’ll start with a 3/16-ounce and go up or down from there as needed.
His favorite knot with any fluorocarbon presentation is the San Diego Jam, and while most literature says that it should employ six to eight twists, he said that four is plenty. “The Uni knot is harder to tie,” he said, whereas he can tie the San Diego Jam “with my eyes closed.”
As to where he fishes them, the shaky-head is better around docks, where he’ll use his flat-bodied Missile Craw, which skips better than his regular straight tailed worm. He also likes a shaky-head around riprap, “especially in stained water environments … (and) especially in areas that have been beat up by other anglers.” It’s also one of his go-to presentations around bream beds and around isolated cover like rock piles.
He said that the dropshot is not as good around grass, but it excels on all sorts of offshore structure, from ledges to humps to drop-offs, especially when you can find the hard bottom sweet spots. It’s also a perfect tool for corralling suspended fish that you locate on your depth-finder. He rigs his dropshot worms either nose-hooked or Texas-rigged, but increasingly finds himself using a wacky rig as well. There’s no rhyme or reason to when he employs it – it’s just a matter of feel.
Finally, he said that the biggest mistake an angler can make is to shake the dropshot too vigorously.
“Less is more,” he implored.
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