Rigging Tips For Swimbaits:

I’ve long had a love/hate relationship with fishing big swimbaits for saltwater bass. I love that they’ll often draw that big bite I’m looking for on tournament day but I hate when that bite comes behind the hook and the fish manages to pull the bait’s pants down enough to realize it’s not something worth coming back for a second attack on. That missed opportunity is bad enough, but adding insult to injury is the fact that your $4 swimbait tail is now compromised enough that it’s likely to keep on slipping down your hook until you get frustrated enough to change it.

When fishing sand bass, my go-to bait is an 8-inch MC Swimbait Slug on a 1-ounce VMC Boxer head and this combo is the undisputed champion of getting its pants pulled down when the sand bass are biting. On a normal tournament day I’ll easily go through a half dozen slugs and if the fish are aggressively tail biting that number can reach a dozen. Sometimes I’ll have to change the bait without landing a single one of those bites.

Well, I’m happy to say that I had a brainstorm while packing my gear for a tournament over the weekend and that dusty light bulb that dimly sparked to life above my head resulted in a ten cent fix that probably saved me 25 bucks worth of Slugs on Saturday.

The top bait in this picture was the only Slug I ended up using all day and after an easy twenty fish at least twice that many missed bites, it didn’t get its pants pulled down a single time. Here’s how I did it.

Get more How To fish tips from Erik here.