Hover rigging is the summer’s hottest new bass tactic. Here’s what you need to know

There’s one thing you can say for certain about bass fishing: if you snooze you lose, especially when it comes to the latest presentations. I mean, no sooner had moping taken centre stage—and almost every top prize in pro bass fishing—when hover rigging pushed it aside. Part of the reason it caught on so quickly was the arrival of forward-facing sonar. Love it or hate it, this technology is now showing us things about fish behaviour we’d never before realized.

For example, we now know how often bass, especially smallmouth, will suspend in one spot, from a few feet off the bottom up to the middle of the water column. Approach the fish in your boat and try to sit over top of them, however, and they’ll drop down to the bottom and go on high alert—if they don’t split up and scatter instead.

That’s what we typically saw when we relied on 2D sonar. Now thanks to forward-facing sonar, we’ve discovered the action can be otherworldly if we stay back from the fish and flick a bait over their heads instead. And that is the secret behind hover rigging.

RIG IT RIGHT

In the days before forward-facing sonar, we’d attach a slender, fluke-style soft-plastic minnow to an appropriately weighted jig and fan cast it around the boat. If we were lucky, we’d swim it past a bass and get a bite. If we weren’t so charmed, though, we’d sit out the dance. Now that forward-facing sonar lets us know if there’s a party going on 20, 30 or 40 feet away, however, we can crash it from a distance. The key here is to use a jig that’s much lighter than you’re accustomed to. It should be so light, in fact, that when you pitch it out and let it flutter down, you can shake your rod tip and make the soft-plastic bait tremble like a mortally wounded minnow, just inches above the bass. The presentation can get even better when you fashion your own hover jig set-up.

My favourite way is to use a sharp, unweighted light-wire jig hook with a 90-degree eye. Instead of inserting the hook into the end of the soft-plastic the traditional way, however, I pierce it through the back of the bait, about one-eighth of an inch behind the nose. I then thread the hook through the body of the bait so that the shank runs through its top half, exiting where the dorsal fin would be located.

I also use a hook that’s one size smaller than if I were using a standard lead head. That way, the hook eye will be flush with the back and barely emerging once I’ve finished rigging. Finally, I slide a tungsten nail weight into the nose of the soft-plastic so it runs parallel to, and just under, the shank. I then add a drop of super glue to lock the nail weight in place, preventing an acrobatic bass from flinging it out as it hurls its body out of the water.

Another other cool way to fashion a hover jig is to place your jig hook in a fly-tying vice and wrap the nail weight to the shank of the hook, keeping the weight’s pointed end below and just in front of the hook eye. That way, the pointed end can act like a bait keeper. And as a bonus, your custom hover jig will cost just pennies compared to a store-bought variety.

KEEP IT LIGHT

No matter how you fashion your hover rig, remember to keep it as light as possible. That way, when you cast it out—I prefer to pitch it underhanded—you can make it perform a death-defying dance over the fish. You’ve never been able to do that before with a jig-hooked soft-plastic, and when the bass see it, they’ll go crazy. The same goes for walleye, for that matter, definitely making hover rigging the hot new tactic of the summer.

Bonus tip: Tackle

Since hover rigging is a finesse presentation, I favour using a seven-foot to seven-foot six-inch medium- to medium-light-action spinning rod and reel spooled with six- to eight-pound braid. Using an Alberto knot, I also attach a monofilament or fluorocarbon leader of similar strength. And because the rig features a needle-sharp hook, there’s no need to slam the fish. Simply lean into it instead, and the hook will embed itself.