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Finding bass with soft plastics

Turn back the clock, if you will, to a spring day in 1999 on Oklahoma’s Lake Eufaula where Gary Yamamoto is throwing one of his eight-inch Single Tail Grubs into the lake’s flooded brush. It’s a Bassmaster Central Invitational, but actual competition is still two days away; Yamamoto is using his thick-bodied, swimming-tail soft plastic worm to find bass, not add them to his livewell.

Now, fast-forward five days. Yamamoto’s soft plastic techniques have earned him a runner-up finish, as well as the heaviest one-day catch of the tournament at more than 25 pounds.

The message here? Soft plastic lures can be used very successfully to locate bass, and when the proper lures are used for the existing conditions, soft plastics may be more versatile than hard baits.

Obviously, Yamamoto is partial to soft plastics. His company is know the world over for some of his creations, including, but not limited to, the Senko, which has been the best-selling soft plastic bait in the United States for several years. Yamamoto developed the first Hula Grub, and used it to win the U.S. Open at Lake Mead. He’s also used some of his other plastics to do well in the Bassmaster Classic and in FLW competitions for years.

“The major advantages soft plastics have are that most of them look very natural in the water, like something a bass would eat,” the Texas pro explained. “Many of them have excellent tail swimming action, even with a slow retrieve, and most can be fished a variety of ways, including rigged weedless so you can penetrate heavy cover. Soft plastics have just one hook too, which will normally produce a higher hook-up ratio.
Hard baits simply do not have all these qualities.”

One of Yamamoto’s favorite fish-finding lures is his own six-inch Single-Tail Grub. He also uses 8 and 10-inch versions when larger bass are present. There are a number of lures like this available on the market, and depending how you rig and retrieve it, a soft plastic bait of this type can literally be fished from top to bottom.

“For example, you can rig a lure like this weightless and weedless and fish it like a buzzbait on or just under the surface through vegetation or around shallow bushes and flooded timber.

“If you want to fish it slower, just let it sink, and then you can retrieve it like a crankbait because that swimming tail is always vibrating. When you’re fishing deeper brush or thicker vegetation, I may add a ½-ounce screw-in sinker and pitch or flip the grub.

“Again, the tail design lets the lure swim down as it falls and swim up as you jig it or retrieve it. If you’re going to use soft plastics to cover a lot of water to find fish, a strong swimming tail action is critical because of the vibration it produces.”

There are even more options with a large plastic grub or worm, such as swimming it back near the bottom. Just cast, let it fall, then slowly begin reeling it back. As you retrieve, alternately raise and lower your rod tip to change the tail’s vibration cadence and let the lure climb and fall.

“You can actually pull fish away from cover with a slow, swimming presentation like this. In fact, that’s what I was doing at Eufaula. Initially, we could catch bass in the bushes by flipping, but continued fishing pressure pushed them deeper into the cover and made them much more reluctant to bite.

“I was pitching slightly past the cover, letting the grub sink, then swimming it slowly beside or through the bushes. My strikes always came several feet beyond the cover, so the bass were following it.”

Fished with this same rise-and-fall swimming motion, a plastic lure will also allow you cover points and flats just as if you were using a spinnerbait or crankbait, and better than a Carolina rig. The main difference being that a swimming-tail grub or worm can be maneuvered up and down in the water column much more efficiently.

Fishing a deep, clear, rocky lake like Table Rock, Powell, or even Shasta? Think about a twin tail grub or a multi-strand hula-type grub. You can rig it weedless and crawl it along the bottom to look like a crawfish. In hard baits, your only real option would be a crankbait; a jig doesn’t look natural this way.

“One of my favorite ways of using a hula grub to find bass is by pitching it against a bluff or rock wall and just letting it fall,” said Yamamoto, who won the U.S. Open with this technique. “You can catch suspended bass, or when the grub hits a ledge, you can crawl it over the edge and let it fall again. A lot of times bass will be holding right along that ledge.

“All I do is rig it on a heavier one-ounce football style jig head with the hook exposed. It falls fast so not only can you cover a lot of water, but you can also generate reaction strikes.”

Of course, Yamamoto also uses his most famous lure, the Senko, when he’s searching for bass, particularly around docks and boathouses. He’ll cast or skip a weightless five-inch model underneath the structure, then just let it sink. The Senko’s erratic, vibrating fall usually takes care of the rest. If he doesn’t get a strike on the initial fall, Yamamoto begins a rise-and-fall retrieve to create multiple falls.

“There isn’t a hard lure available that will produce this type of ‘dying shad’ appearance, but with a soft plastic lure you can have it on every cast.

“If you think about it, soft plastics really do offer a lot of advantages when you’re searching for bass. You can rig them weedless, so you can fish them virtually anywhere. And if you choose a lure with a strong, swimming tail, you can produce all the vibration you want, just by changing your retrieve speed. You can bounce a grub off a stump just like a crankbait, but then you can let it fall to the bottom or swim it to the surface.

“Your imagination is really the limit in how effective you can make a soft plastic lure, but best of all, most soft plastics really look completely natural, like they belong in the water.”