JoeHaub

About half the time bass will blow up on buzzbaits and miss the hook. A buddy in the Navy came up with a cool mod for that buzzbait your buddy loaned you. He opened the loop that holds the in-line spinner blade, took a Tru Tungsten frog hook with some heat-shrink tubing on its double shaft, and clipped it on the opened loop. Then he closed the loop with his needle-nose pliers, slid the tubing up over the interlocking loops, and heated it to form a semi-rigid sheath. This puts a deadly dual-hook right behind the buzz blade. If you were to then slide a half inch of silicone tubing over the clip on the in-line spinnerblade and impale it on the main buzzbait hook as a trailer blade, you've created a truly lethal weapon... three hooks between two flashing blades. By doing this, his hook-up rate increased to 100%.

I've seen that happen a few times. That indicates too much action. Especially in clear water, the more subtle the motion, the better your odds of getting bit. When anglers report having problems with this technique and I observe them, the most common error I see is jiggling the rod tip non-stop or putting too much action in their lure. By just lifting the rod tip enough to maintain slight tension on the line so the elastic cord is stretched a little, every minuscule shake or vibration of your hand is transmitted to the lure, and that can be all it takes.

Drop shotting uses an upward jerk and then a drift back down by gravity, and while it's usually done vertically, fan-casting stump fields, casting under docks and around laydowns works, obviously. Line for dropshotting rocks? I rely on Sufix Seige and Elite... both are abraision resistant. (Sufix website offers a $6 rebate coupon for 2 spools through 9/15. Go to sufix.com an click USA, then look for the coupon link.) That's what I used on a fly-in lake in Ontario a few weeks back... full of chunk rocks and jagged boulders, and it held up great under the abuse. But no matter what you use, check your line for nicks every so often and retie when you detect abrasion or risk losing a pig like Steezy's.