(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.)
Last year, Seth Feider divulged one of Mark Zona’s favorite blade-bait rigging secrets in this space, so if turnabout is fair play, it’s Zona’s turn to do the same. He’ll even give credit to his source, naming it the “Seth Feider Rig.”
What is it?
It’s a Ned Rig substitute. While the ultra-popular Ned Rig gets bites just about anywhere, Zona noted that he’s suffered through two of its most frequent downsides. First, it tends to require a light wire hook, one that larger-than-average bass can bend out or escape. Second, it gets hung up in cover just about any time that it even looks at it funny. “I don’t know what it is about that,” said the Michigan pro. “I don’t want to throw it.”
This new rigging system overcomes those problems.
The Feider Rig, he said, comes through just about any cover you can imagine – brush, rocks, timber and boulders – and rarely hangs up, but still maintains the finesse presence that made the original Ned Rig so deadly. He starts with a 4-inch soft plastic stick worm, like a Strike King Ocho, and then Texas-rigs it with a 2/0 Trokar finesse hook, the same model he’d use to dropshot in and around brush. “The hook is a massive key here,” he said. “If one bites it, you’ve got him.”
Next, he takes scissors and cuts the previously-pointy tail off of the Ocho to make a flat rear end. Once that’s done, he’ll superglue a nail weight, usually 1/8- or 3/16-ounce, but occasionally as heavy as 1/4-ounce, “right into the bottom of that worm.”
Rigged that way, “that will come through anything on Planet Earth.”
He fishes the Feider Rig on a 7’1” Daiwa Tatula Brent Ehrler signature series rod – the same model he’d use to fish a dropshot – paired with a 2500-size spinning reel. He spools the latter up with a main line of 20-pound Seaguar Smackdown braid attached to a leader of 6- or 8-pound Seaguar fluorocarbon.
The rig doesn’t require all that much angler effort to get it to dance: “Let it do the work itself,” Zona said. “You kind of let it do its own magic.” He’ll make a medium to long cast and then just bonce it back to the boat. This “reverse shaky-head” is so effective because “the bait is always, constantly, standing up. Always upright, kind of just moving.”
While it garners him lots of bites, including when the fishing is tough, Zona said that anglers shouldn’t sleep on the possibility that it’ll produce big ones, too. It’s effective for largemouths, smallmouths and spots alike, any place you want to present a downsized bottom-bounding option, and it comes through cover far better than most.
If you want to learn some of Zona’s sneaky finesse tactics, honed by years of chasing clear-water smallmouths around the north, check out his full video, available only by subscribing to The Bass University TV.
