Are You Rigging Your Worms Right?

By David A. Brown
Special to BassFan

Sticking a long, slender piece of plastic on a hook – how hard can that be, right? Short answer: “Not very.” That being said, several key considerations merit addressing.

The fact is, the venerable Texas rig may be one of the most user-friendly tools in the bass angler’s box, but a sloppy, ineffective setup can nullify its impact. So let’s consider a few tips from pros in the know.

FLW Tour pro Terry Bolton’s a big fan of flipping and pitching Texas-rigged worms into laydowns, brush, etc.; so he’s a stickler for getting his rigs properly aligned. Preferring a 4/0 VMC worm hook, Bolton starts by inserting the hook point just until the worm’s head reaches the bend.

That’s when he brings the hook out the side of the bait and runs the worm up to the top of the shank and pushes it over the offset (the “neck”). Don’t get lazy here, tug that hook eye into the plastic where it creates a streamlined package that allows a bullet weight to sit smoothly atop your bait. If you skip the sinker, hiding the eye minimizes your risk of catching grass.

The next step – inserting the hook back into the worm – bears great impact on how your bait performs. Stick the point too high and your worm wants to ride up the hook bend. Too low and you end up with excess plastic in the hook gap.

Bolton ensures proper placement by holding his hook by the shank, marking the point where his hook bend aligns to the worm and then scooching that alignment spot up to the hook point. Inserting the hook there ensures that once the point runs through the worm, the bait aligns neatly with no bunching or stretching.

Once properly aligned, your streamlined Texas rig will enter and exit cover smoothly, while allowing the worm to work as it’s designed. That may mean a simple, featureless profile, or a big, lanky deal with a ribbon tail dripping with attitude. Either way, make sure your rig works for you; not against you.

Now, one of Bolton’s key detail points is prudently aligning his hook for maximum motion in worms with curl or ribbon tails. Most, he notes, have visible seams, so utilizing these longitudinal guidelines helps create a more efficient presentation.

“By rigging my hook on that seam, I get the water to flow down along that tail and you get a lot more action out of your worm,” Bolton said.

Complementing Bolton’s Texas-rig pointers, a few other pros offered their tips to improve worm rigging efficiency.

Running Right

Bolton’s fellow Tour pro Jim Tutt is a big fan of swimming a Senko through shallow grass, but sometimes the bait’s mass isn’t quite enough to accomplish his presentation objectives. Specifically, when Tutt needs a little more casting distance or he wants to sink his bait deeper along the edges, he’ll forgo the obvious option of adding a nose weight in favor of a more creative solution.

Borrowing Suspend Dots from the jerkbait arsenal, Tutt wraps these adhesive weights around the shank of his wide gap hook. Stopping here, though, would offer a short-lived effort most likely to succumb to the scrapings of shallow cover.

To keep his weight dots in place, Tutt coats the altered hook shank with Hard as Nails nail polish. Black is his go-to, but try red as a splash of eye-catching color that may flip the occasional switch.

Weight Wisdom

Pegging the sinker used to escort your worm to the bottom and enhance the distance/accuracy thing can become a hang-up magnet unless pegged in place. Legendary flipper Denny Brauer prefers a rubber pegging nail, but he has a particular routine for ensuring what he considers a critical detail – perfect bait alignment.

First, Brauer snugs the nail through his Strike King tungsten weight, bottom-to-top. Next, he’ll snip off the broad end flush with the weight’s bottom and then pull the nail into the top half. He’ll then cut the rubber nail flush with the sinker’s top edge.

Essentially, he hides his peg inside the weight, but the real advantage is the fit. By pulling the pegging nail into the weight and then snipping the excess, Brauer snugs his line at the weight’s top end and leaves space for the line to hang freely at the bottom end. With a peg running through the entire weight, the line pinches to one side and skews the bait at an angle. This way, Brauer’s bait centers below the weight for a streamlined package.

Dress It Up

Strike King pro-staffer Roger Stegall pulls a page from his Carolina-rigging manual and adds a glass bead under his bullet weight. That accessory, he said, protects his hook from the abuse of a non-pegged sinker, while creating a little extra sound that might get a fish looking the right way.

Junk in the Trunk

Tim Horton will occasionally convert a standard Texas-rigged worm into what’s known as the M.J. rig (named for its innovator, Mike Johnson). This deal is really nothing more than a Texas- or Carolina-rigged worm with its tail accented by a No. 2 or No. 3 willow-leaf or Colorado blade with an Owner Centering Pin Spring linked via ball-bearing swivel.

“It really gives a lot of flash and that’s productive, especially if you’re in very fertile lakes like Falcon, the Tennessee River lakes, the upper end of Toledo Bend where you have a little bit of stain in the water, but the fish still get offshore,” Horton said. “The biggest thing to me is that the fish haven’t seen it much, so you’re giving yourself an advantage.”

Horton said the MJ rig’s attraction spans the range of his worm applications. He’s found it effective for flipping cypress trees in 2 to 3 feet of water, Carolina-rigging in 15 to 20 feet or swimming along the outside edge of hydrilla lines during a shad spawn.

“This rig gives you an alternative to a spinnerbait,” Horton said. “It’s not quite as visually loud as a spinnerbait, the blade is really compact and it comes in streamlined with the soft plastic. It looks like the tail of a shad kicking and they bite it.”

Give these tips a try and experiment with your own worm-rigging innovations to enhance one of bass fishing’s most tenured baits.