This Week @ Bass Edge

Detailing jigs and trailers

Bassmaster Elite Series pro Mike McClelland has always been a stickler for details.

“I’ve always been accused of being a perfectionist,” McClelland explained. “Even before I got into fishing, I was in a paint-and-wall-covering contracting business, and everything we did I just always put on the final touches. I kind of take that same approach to the baits that I throw. I want them to look as good as they can possibly look before I put them in the water.”

The detailing process begins by thinning the skirts on either his football or finesse jigs.

“There are a lot of great factory colored skirts. One example is the Jewel green gourd with orange. Basically it is a green gourd skirt with five strands of orange in it.”  

McClelland usually keeps the five strands of orange in the skirt if he is fishing extremely dirty water but he feels the five strands of orange might be too flashy for clear water so he pulls out two or three strands.
 
“Typically I don’t just grab two or three random stands and pull them. I take out the three middle strands and leave the two outer ones. It’s probably all in my mind, but I feel like if I just leave two strands that are on the very bottom of the jig, when that part of the jig falls I lose the effect that I am trying to get. If I take the three inner strands out and leave the two outer strands when that jig falls it kinds of spreads that orange color out, and it is not just a streak of orange.”
 
Whenever he opts for a jig in the color combination of peanut butter-jelly and smoke, McClelland rigs the jig so the smoke side of the skirt is on the bottom.

“So when I am casting that jig and it is falling relatively flat the color the fish see more is that smoke side.”

He says the falling lure then resembles a baitfish and once it hits bottom, the peanut butter side is more visible and the jig then looks more like a crawfish.

McClelland believes that rigging the light section of the skirt on the bottom gives his jig a more natural look.

“Very few crawfish-imitating baits that we throw have a white belly on them but if you pick up a crawfish and look at its belly it is mostly white.”

The jig trailer receives most of McClelland’s attention to details. His favorite trailers for finesse and football jigs are a Super Chunk, Super Chunk Junior, Baby Brush Hog and Critter Craw, which all receive various modifications.

 “The only thing I do to the Critter Craw is shorten it just to make the bait more compact,” says McClelland.

When attaching the plastic chunk, McClelland threads the jig’s hook through the fat part of the chunk rather than having most of the chunk hang off the end of the hook in the fashion anglers use to rig a jig and pork frog. He also makes an incision in both of the chunk’s flappers to make them look like crawfish pincers. 

“That gives it a little more action, and I think it gives the trailer a more realistic look.”

In most situations, McClelland chooses the jig-and-chunk when he believes bass are feeding on bream and dips the flappers in chartreuse dye.  He feels the flash or chartreuse on his trailer mimics the coloring on the fins and tails of a sunfish.
 
The Baby Brush Hog gets plenty of slicing and coloring from McClelland. He clips the middle of the soft plastic lure’s paddles to make them look like pincers and dips orange dye on its tentacles.  On the upper portion of the creature bait, McClelland separates the two legs from the lure’s body and snips a section just above where the legs attach to the main body.

“That actually gives the bait a little more bulk up in the skirt when it is put on the jig and makes it look like legs sticking out from the skirt as well.”
 
The jig and creature bait becomes McClelland’s primary choice when he feels bass are foraging on crawfish. He believes the tentacles on the Baby Brush Hog more closely resembles a mud bug better than a plastic chunk.

“When you look at a crawfish in the water, the pincers are there but when that crawfish is moving around those tentacles really show out more. The tentacles on a crawfish are fairly long and that’s the way the tentacles are on the Baby Brush Hog. I’ve heard of guys throwing live crawfish in the tanks at Bass Pro Shops and when they would throw a crawfish in there without pincers versus one that had pincers the bass would always eat the one without pincers first.”

McClelland is unsure how much his attention to detail impresses the fish, but it does give him more confidence, especially in pressure situations.

“My mind set on that is one or two more bites a day that I might get because I detail out my bait a little bit more than the guy who went down the bank before me could make a huge difference. I know of a lot of occasions I have fished behind somebody throwing a jig and caught fish behind them.”

One instance was the 2006 Bassmaster Memorial at Eagle Mountain Lake in Texas.

“Everybody was fishing docks on the lake, and I was fishing multiple docks behind people. That was the first year the Baby Brush Hog really started being a key component as a trailer, and I really believe I was getting a lot of bites behind guys because of the modified trailer I used on that jig.”