Drop in for a Quick Bite

LISTEN: (5 min, 48 sec)

 

NOT EVERY FISHING TRIP is ideal. Recently I found myself at a lake with a cheap combo rod, a box of hooks and soft plastics and a few hours to kill. I didn’t have my usual fishing kayak, fish finder, anchors, rod holders or any of the items I often bring that help make a fishing trip, if not easier, a little more comfortable. I spent an hour or so casting off a dock with little success. I tied on all the classics. A football jig, a Texas rigged worm, a Senko, a shallow diving crankbait, and nothing seemed to want to bite, so I decided to try my old tried and true, the drop shot. 

A few minutes in, I had a bass on the line and finally felt that confidence that so easily fades when you’re not catching fish. A while later, after no more catches, I figured I needed to try to get out into the deeper water, so I asked around and found a small, bare bones kayak to borrow. I tossed in the rod, a box of soft plastics, a life jacket and took off out into the open water. Luckily there was a constant breeze blowing towards the middle of the lake, not only moving me along at a steady clip, but also creating chop on the water to help give some lower light penetration, cover and confidence to the bass swimming below.

When I don’t have a lot of time to sit and work an area I think is holding bass, I try to let the water do the work for me. In this case I decided to do some good old fashioned drifting with the drop shot. I had never tried that before, so I figured it would be a good opportunity to see what would happen and if this was a viable method of fishing for the future. The rod I had, an Ugly Stik GX2 combo, was fairly sensitive and I could feel each and every bump along the bottom, and at a reasonable price point I wouldn’t be too heartbroken if it fell off the very unstable and much too small kayak I was using. 

The drop shot rig, as much as you would think it would get tangled, did fairly well at staying weedless as I drifted along. Occasionally I had to remove a few weeds, but not much more than I would under any other “weedless” fishing scenario. I made sure to rig the worm in a way to prevent the point of the hook from sticking out of the nose of the worm, keeping it just below the surface of the plastic as one would with a weedless worm on a Texas rig. The drop shot weight itself did occasionally fall into a pocket of vegetation and get hung up briefly but came loose easily as the wind blew the kayak along. Overall, I was fairly impressed with how the rig held up over four long drifts over some medium weed cover and some fairly significant depth changes and drop offs. 

Even with years of bass fishing under my belt and hundreds, if not thousands of ticks felt at the end of my line, I will say I was having a hard time discerning a bite in this situation. With so much weed cover there was a fair amount of movement from the rod tip and it was a little difficult feeling the difference between a true bite from a bass, from the weight bouncing off the bottom or getting slightly hung up on weeds, but as anyone who has fished for bass knows, when they decide to take the bait, there will be no doubt that one is on the end of your line. 

Over the years I have tried fishing the drop shot a multitude of ways. I have used braid, mono and currently I have found that I get the best result with fluorocarbon line. With its invisibility underwater and its abrasion resistance I can still feel the fish messing with my soft plastic fairly well like with braid, but when I am bouncing it or dragging it along the bottom, I am not getting all that added stretch that I get when I am fishing the drop shot, or any jig or soft plastic along the bottom with mono. I also have found that in deeper water fishing, especially in highly snaggy areas with sunken trees or brush, braid, when hung up, can be almost impossible to snap off so fluorocarbon seems to bridge the gap between mono and braid, making it work well for me. You can experiment as well to see what works best for you. 

At the end of the day, the drop shot, and drifting are both effective methods I have used to catch bass independently of one another. The combination of the two seemed to work well under the conditions I was under, which were medium weed cover, choppy waters and late afternoon fishing. I think this would be a good combination for anyone to try if you simply don’t have a lot of time to spare, but still want to catch a few fish. Is it the best for all situations? I would say no, but it is something to add to your already fully loaded arsenal of bass fishing, because half the fun is figuring out new ways to find them and how to get them to bite!  

At the end of the day, I was able to catch a few fish with one of my favorite fishing methods. Under ideal conditions and with more time I would love to experiment all day long to see what the bass want, change lures and soft plastics every 15 minutes and find what is making their clock tick that day, hour or minute. When I am in a time crunch though, I like to fish what I know, and this is when the drop shot comes in handy. If you haven’t ever tried this method for bass, I’d highly encourage you to give it a shot. 

I prefer to use tungsten cylinder weights, fluorocarbon line, drop shot hooks and a fairly sensitive graphite rod with an open face reel, but you can try fishing it any way you’d like. The important thing is to get outdoors, try new things and hopefully catch a few fish while you’re at it.

 

Email Paul Fuzinski at ContactUs@fishgame.com

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