Comments on: Brent Ehrler shares his best finesse fishing tip

By: George Kramer

George Kramer — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 21:00:47 +0000

My own approach would be: Take either end of the spectrum– shake or slide–and do it until you think you’re overdue in getting a bite. Then go the other way.

OR, use a one revolution (not of the handle, but the bail) go-and-stop retrieve, letting the bait fall all the way to the bottom since you’re shallow anyway.

Such a Neopolitan-like retrieve gives you a little acceleration, a little swim, a little fall, repeated over again. Somewhere in the bowl is the right flavor for the moment, at least it is with a Road Runner.

By: Dan

Dan — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 20:12:58 +0000

Thanks. I searched on Shin Fukae after you mentioned him above and found an article you wrote on him at the In-Fisherman website.

By: Ned Kehde

Ned Kehde — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 19:37:10 +0000

Dan:
We normally fish from 10 am to 2 pm, and in Kansas the wind blows a lot during that time frame. Therefore, to keep the wind from creating a bow in our lines, we have to point our rods down in the five o’clock position. When the rod is in that position, we shake it up and down, as well as side to side; it depends on how we are standing and the angle that the line enters the water
The length of the shake ranges from one inch to three inches.
The frequency varies. Sometimes it will incessant. Other times it will be as the bait is falling or gliding after a lift. Sometimes it will be only during the lift. When the angler in the back of the boat is executing the drag-and-deadstick motif, he will often shake it after deadsticking it and just before he commences the drag, and sometimes he shake it for the entire drag.
When we accompanied Shin Fukae at Beaver Lake, Ark., several Aprils ago, he performed what we call the Shin Shake with a jig and Shad Shape Worm for the entire retrieve. He also did it with a 3/8-ounce spider jig dressed a customized creature-bait trailer. His baits never touched the bottom. Watching Fukae was an eye-opening experience for us. Until then we were minimum shakers, and doing it mostly during the initial fall of the lure, and when we slowly retrieved it back to the boat, we primarily used Charlie Brewer’s do-nothing retrieve.
We still don’t shake our baits as much as Shin, but we shake them a lot more than we used to shake them. Because our waters are relatively stained,and much more stained than the clear waters that Charlie Brewer used to ply, our new procedure of incorporating significant series of shakes seems to provoke more strikes than we elicited during our pre-Shin Fukae days.
Of course, we don’t have any comparative statistics to validate that contention; yet our intuitions tell us that a lot of shakes often inveigles more bass than than a no- or minimum-shake retrieve.
You can read other stories were anglers are cautioned not to shake. Russ Comeau recently wrote such a story.
Nowadays, we will always try the do-nothing motif if our shaking tactics don’t elicit enough strikes. In short, it is often wise to be versatile rather than one way.
Hope this answers your questions.
Ned

By: Dan

Dan — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 16:26:16 +0000

Ned,

Can you describe more what you mean by “shaking” the rod? This seems to be a key part of your technique as described in your Jan 2010 In-Fisherman article. I’m assuming it’s a vertical up and down shake, that makes the most sense to me. How far up and down, an inch or two? What’s the frequency of the up and down motion? Once or twice a second or is it more rapid?

Thanks,
Dan

By: George Kramer

George Kramer — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 21:27:31 +0000

We feel the same way about rap and rip rap.

By: Ned Kehde

Ned Kehde — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 20:09:34 +0000

George:
Casey Kidder of Topeka, Kansas, is a devotee of Midwest finesse fishing, and after reading the comments on your Web site, he suggested that we should “mention the Gopher’s effectiveness on riprap. The snagless aspects of the Gopher are best with a small hook and braided line. Plus braided line allows one to easily snap a jig free when it is incidentally snagged on a rock.”
Ned

By: Ned Kehde

Ned Kehde — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 02:06:16 +0000

George:
Yes, you can wield an 1/8- and 3/16-ounce jig with a soft-plastic lure affixed to it with an exposed hook. And you can use a jig with a No. 1 and 1/0 hook. You can use six-pound-test, too. We use six-pound-test in the winter sometimes.
But we have found that a 1/32- and 1/16-ounce jig with a No. 6 and No. 4 hook catches us more bass than the big jigs and hooks do.
We catch most of our bass in three to eight feet of water year-around — even when there some small sheets of ice floating around parts of the lake. We rarely probe deeper than 12 feet, and then we might opt for a 3/32-ounce Gopher Mushroom jig.
There are many outings when we don’t allow our jig and soft-plastic lure get to the bottom. We try to keep them in a semi-state of suspension, allowing them swim, glide and shake well off the bottom. To accomplish this, we have to use small or lightweight jigs. We also think that it might be easier to accomplish this task if we us a monofilament leader rather than a fluorocarbon leader; the reason for this that we have been told that fluorocarbon sinks more faster than monofilament.
Of course, there are some days, when we have drag and dead-stick our jigs and soft-plastics along the bottom to elicit strikes, and we like the way our light and tiny jigs perform this task, too.
Gete Hibdon told Michael Jones years ago, when Jones was writing his guide to finesse fishing: “fisherman tend to use too much weight. And, with too much weight the baits don’t work right.” Gete’s observation about too much weight lies at the heart of Midwest finesse.
As for the vegetation you asked about: several of our small reservoirs in eastern Kansas are graced with coontail, bushy pondweed, curly-leaf pondweed, American water willow and a few other varieties aquatic vegetation that bass tend to abide in.
Ned

By: George Kramer

George Kramer — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 21:44:16 +0000

Okay Ned. You got my attention. But what are those “weeds” you are talking about? We have very little in most SoCal lakes–just that snot moss in summer. Can’t I fish a 1/16 with an exposed #1 or 1/0 as I do with 1/8- and 3/16-ounce dart and peaheads. I would try a 1/32nd mushroom, only I’m the media guy fishing in the backseat. Nobody’s gonna slow down enough so my bait can hit the bottom in our world. And why not 6-pound instead of 8- to speed up the fall?

By: Ned Kehde

Ned Kehde — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 20:11:11 +0000

Dan:
One reason why we use exposed hooks is because the the size of the hook on the 1/32-ounce Gopher Mushroom jig is a number six, and in our eyes that is too small of a hook for a Texas rig or even a Tex-posed rig. Another reason is that we rarely ply flooded timber and brush piles; so we don’t need a weedless rig.
A third reason is that we think that the 2 1/2″ Zero has a more seductive action when it is rigged with the hook exposed.
Also when we fish a jigworm with an exposed hook around patches of coontail and curly-leaf pondweed, we like to hook a stem of those plants with the exposed hook; it seems to us that when that occurs we occasionally provoke a bass to engulf the jigworm as we shake it off the stem.
We also use a 1/16-ounce Gopher Mushroom jig with a No. 4 hook and a 3/32 Gopher Mushroom jig with a No. 2 hook. We use an exposed hook with them, too.
We have caught as many as 185 to 200 bass on the same Zero. But as a Zero ages, it becomes too buoyant to use on a 1/32-ounce Gopher. When that occurs, we use it on the 1/16-ounce Gopher.
We also soak the Zeros in Gulp Attractant. In 2009, we used Gulp nightcrawler, and in 2010 we will test Gulp crayfish attractant. We think the Gulp helps, but we can’t scientifically prove that it works.
We rarely use the 3/32-ounce Gopher Mushroom jig, and when we do, it is primarily employed with a 4″ Yum Muy Grub. On extremely wind days, which can be frequent in Kansas, we will occasionally use it on a Zero.
We let the flipper and pitchers and other power anglers have all of the brush piles and flooded trees at the lakes that we fish. In our eyes, most of those objects are overfished. So we tend to ply areas that many of the power anglers deem to be ugly waters because they are often featureless to the human eye. The Zero and a 1/32- and 1/16-ounce Gopher Mushroom jig rarely becomes snagged with the several of the retrieves that we employ. (Some of those retrieves were discussed in the Dec-Jan In-Fisherman article)
We frequently test new braided lines, and when we wrote the recent story on our finesse tactics, we were using Stren Microfuse. Now we are using Cajun.
I like the feel of braid, but I think that an angler can catch as many fish using eight-pound-test monofilament. We are thinking about spending several months making some comparison test of monofilament, fluorocarbon and braid, and we also want to work with braid that is devoid of a fluorocarbon leader; in other words, we tie the jig directly to the braid. We suspect that this line testing will evolve once we get over our mission to catch 101 bass on every four-hour outing.
Hope this explains our methods and some of the ideas behind them.
Ned

By: Dan

Dan — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 17:06:07 +0000

Ned,

Thanks for your response. I live in Alabama very near the Wheeler and Guntersville reservoirs and thought I would give your finesse tactics a try down here. Besides the Bass Guide issue, I saw them also written up in a recent In-Fisherman article on winter bass. There you mentioned using MicroFuse braid I believe. Those are some impressive numbers of fish you and your partners are pulling in. If I can do half that well I’ll be happy.

I made a list of the soft plastics you are using and will try to located those locally before the weekend. I’ve got some Charlie Brewer slider jig heads in 1/16 that should do to start. Your articles said you rig the hook points exposed rather than Texas rigged. Why?

Dan