oh big lunker baby
one of the lures you will always find on my fishing kayak or in my tackle box is the wacky
worm or what a lot of people call the wacky rig and the beauty about it is that likely you
already have everything you need already in your tackle box you just need to learn the technique
and man this thing slays some bass all right first i'm going to show you how to set up the wacky worm
first you're going to need a 5 inch senko i like the green pumpkin for the clear water
presentations if i'm fishing stained water or muddy water i'll break out a black or blue or even
a black senko next is your hook and you get a lot of different opinions on this but i've dialed this
in over many years i like the size one gamakatsu octopus hook and i've tried other wacky worm hooks
in fact recently i tried one since sixth sense and the first bass that i caught it back out the hook
so i like a really stout hook and the gamma katsu size one octopus does the trick and let's talk
about hooks for a second buy high quality hooks trust me you do not want to learn this lesson
the unfortunate way guys we spend thousands of dollars on boats and gear and tackle
do not try to save a couple bucks on hooks buy high quality ones and for my setup i usually use a
medium power rod and i use 10 pound braid or i'll use 10 pound fluorocarbon usually does trick and
there's a couple ways to set this up you can buy one of these wacky tools they're really cheap i'll
hold it on the description below and essentially you put the worm inside then you run one of these
rubber rings around it and boom there you go essentially we do take the hook rub it around
the rubber ring and why you want to set it up this way is so you don't lose a ton of rubber
worms because the other way you can actually hook it straight to the worm but after about 15 to 20
casts it's going to rip out the plastic you're gonna lose the worm you have to keep on setting
it over and over again the downsides of this and i found out i just went on a fishing trip
is a lot of times small bass will come and grab this and rip the worm right from the ring
basically you'll reel in your hook and all there will be is this little ring here the plastic ring
so that's kind of that's one downside the other downsides it takes a little time to set these up
i mean we're talking seconds but nonetheless if you're out in the lake the last thing you want to
do is mess around with gear i want to be fishing all the time you might be thinking hey i can just
set this up the night before pro tip i would not recommend that i did that to these right here
and as you can see the ring has enough pressure to kind of break and rip your worm in half it did
that on probably half of these guys and the other half it did not so depending on the composition
of your worm uh pre-rigging these with the little rubber rings might rip them right in half so keep
that in mind and the second way to hook the worm which is my personal favorite is right
through the worm itself where i always hook it is right to the inside of the cotellum of the worm
and boom there you go uh the small bass you're not going to nibble this off you might just feel the
nibble but you're going to keep your worm on there one of the other reasons i like this is actually
hides the hook a little bit the cons of this every 5 to 10 casts you got to keep an eye on this
because this will get really loose so what you have to do is kind of re-hook it into a different
part of the worm or eventually you're going to make that cast and this thing's going to go flying
now there's a few things to take consideration when fishing the wacky worm 99 of the time i fish
the wacky rig i fish it weightless i know there's some times you can put some nail weights in the
end or a pan head screw and it kind of makes it kind of like cheap a poor man's niko rig all
right next how do i retrieve the wacky worm and this is key if you can dial us in the bathroom to
slam this thing so essentially what to do is use this as a target strategy if i like that pocket
or that cover i'll throw this out and what i'll do is let it pause for a few seconds maybe one or two
seconds depending on the shelf that i'm on and a lot of times the bass will smash it right on the
pause if i don't i give a little tug tuck tuck tug and i stop let it pause and usually what the bass
will do they'll smash it on that pause but if i do that series five times and i don't catch a
bass i just go and reel it and i've found over the years anything past five tugs i typically would
not get a bite so don't spend a ton of time retrieving uh after five tugs you're just wasting
your time you'll have a better chance of catching bass if you reel it in and cast to a different
spot another fun thing about the wacky worm is when you throw it a lot of times you can see it
and the bass will hit it like a top water frog boom there'll be a blow up and it's a ton of fun
and so many times you actually see the bass strike this before you actually feel the bass
and he's got another pro tip here do not set the hook unless you feel the full weight of the fish
on the wacky room a lot of times you'll lose it and set the hook too early because you'll see it
before the bass had actually had time to swallow it now this is especially true a lot
of times when you use braid you're feeling braid out braid floats on top of the water
you'll be able to tell if the bass took it on the fall because this will tighten out and start
moving so just keep that in mind you want to feel the full weight even though you can see the braid
moving give it another tug and make sure that thing is actually taking it before you set the
hook simply put the wacky rig will simply smash bass i was just down in southeast ohio for a four
day fishing trip and there were three of us and we caught 308 bass primarily using the wacky worm
guys it's just not numbers it got four and a half pound bass five and a half pound bass on the wacky
rig so dial in this rig and you will be happy with your results hey guys thanks for watching see ya