(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.)
Veteran BPT pro Brent Ehrler was born and raised in California and still calls the West Coast home. That may be a disadvantage when it comes time to drive to many of the tournament venues, but it’s proven to be a boon when it comes to learning new Japanese techniques.
“I’ve seen this stuff from day 1,” he said. He was paired with or conversed with various Japanese anglers in local tournaments and at the U.S. Open on Lake Mead. “They’re the ones who deserve the credit for the dropshot, for the Neko Rig.”
Indeed, the Neko Rig has all but replaced the shaky-head in his arsenal these days, which is saying a lot because Ehrler has won hundreds of thousands of dollars shaking a worm on a ball-head jig in deep water.
His favorite soft plastic for the Neko Rig is the 5-inch Yamamoto Senko, although he acknowledges that “you can take any straight-tail worm.” What makes the Senko so deadly is its weight. “These things are about as heavy as good,” he said, which means that you can fish it as deep as 50 feet of water. He typically inserts a 3/32-ounce Ark Tungsten nail weight, which has a smaller footprint than a comparable lead weight. “You don’t even know that it’s there” and the key is to rig it as straight as possible.
“Now it acts like a missile, it acts like a bullet,” Ehrler continued. Rather than waving side-to-side like a normal wacky rig, the lure falls head first. He rigs it on a Gamakatsu wacky hook, through an O-Ring placed toward the front of the egg sack. Without that O-Ring, you’ll quickly cast off the Senko and lose your valuable tungsten sinker. He’s particular about the way that he rigs the hook, making sure that the point is always headed from the head of the worm (the end with the weight in it) toward the tail, which insures that the point ends up in the roof of the mouth.
After catching a few fish, the Senko will invariably tear because it is ultra-soft, but rather than replacing it Ehrler just moves the O-Ring 1/16 or 1/8 of an inch, to a fresh piece of the worm.
So where does he use it in place of a dropshot? The dropshot still typically gets the call when fishing vertically and very deep because it falls faster, but when casting, he almost always employs the Neko. “It acts like a wacky rig when it’s on the bottom,” he said. He notes that it’s not as weedless as a Texas Rig or shaky-head, and you will lose some, but Gamataksu’s weedless wacky hook with two titanium weed guards alleviates that issue somewhat. “I’m not afraid to throw it in brush piles anymore.”
The other element of his system that has made this technique so effective is the addition of Garmin’s Panoptix Live to his arsenal. He can watch fish follow the lure to the bottom, shake it a few times, and watch them eat it.
If you want to learn some other information about the evolution of Ehrler’s soft plastics system, as well as find out the deepest he’s ever caught a bass, check out his full video, filmed at the Bassmaster Classic in Alabama, available only by subscribing to The Bass University TV.
