For a weedless setup, do you prefer a weedless hook with a belly-weight or a weedless jig head?
I have been playing around with a paddletail which is new to me, the Berkley Cull Shad in the 10cm and 12.5cm sizes. I was quite surprised how much difference there is in “bulk/profile” between these 10cm and 12.5cm lengths and I find myself more drawn to the smaller 10cm version at the moment. Very early days though. I like the look of these Cull Shads on a straight retrieve and I’ve been experimenting with different rigging options as per the two photos below for example………….
The 10cm Berkley Cull Shad rigged on a BKK Silent Chaser EWG Round Head 3/0 3.5g jig head
The 10cm Berkley Cull Shad rigged on a BKK Titan Diver Worm Hook 3/0 3.5g
It’s a similar story with that Savage Gear 14cm Collapser paddletail I was specifically talking about here and here recently. Plenty of soft plastic lures hit the market these days, but if you want to take paddletails which were intended for the freshwater market and use them for something like (sea) bass, then the information you can find about rigging and fishing them is often somewhat limited.
The Savage Gear 14cm Collapser rigged on a BKK Titan Diver Worm Hook 4/0 4.5g
Hence the experimenting with rigging and fishing with various lures. I can’t prove that messing around with stuff always makes a big difference to my fishing, but it feeds into the way my head works and I always enjoy the learning process. A friend of mine for example is really good at bass fishing with his Labrax Mafia paddletails especially on the various Decoy Violence VJ-36 weedless jig heads, indeed I rarely see Dave using a belly-weighted weedless hook. I know how much he favours the lighter weight jig heads especially and in turn it makes me wonder what the best approach might be. Both approaches offer different options.
The Labrax Mafia Capo 150 rigged on a Decoy Violence VJ-36 jig head 4/0 7g
I can definitely see a bit of a difference in how some paddletails swim when you rig them with either way - jig heads or belly-weight weedless hooks. I don’t have much freshwater lure fishing experience so I tend to make this bass fishing stuff up as I go along, and my “default” I guess has been more often than not to turn to the belly-weight weedless hooks when I want to or need to swim something like a paddletail nice and shallow. And then turn to the weedless jig head option when I want or need a bit of extra weight, or when I think that a specific paddletail like the Slender Scoop Shad seems to fish even better than it already does - with a jig head instead of the weedless hook. To be fair though this lure slays either way so I might be getting myself a bit tied in knots here.
Savage Gear Slender Scoop Shad 15cm rigged on a Decoy Violence VJ-36 jig head 4/0 7g
What I think I am trying to get at is that I think I need to spend more time experimenting with the weedless jig heads which have the combination of a large enough hook for the lure AND a lighter head. If you really go looking there don’t seem to be many good quality weedless jig heads which we can turn to for bass fishing, hence I guess the popularity of those Decoy Violence VJ-36 heads. Which I really like I might add, but I know I need to give more time to the lighter heads especially. Those BKK Silent Chaser EWG Round Head weedless jig heads feel like slightly better quality weedless hooks to me, but these jig heads are not as easy to track down.
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