It’s essential to rig soft-plastic baits so they’re arrow straight. Here’s why

We’re fanatics when it comes to rigging our soft-plastic baits arrow straight. I mean, we’ll slide a swimbait off the shank of a jig multiple times if it’s the least bit crooked or it just doesn’t look right. Now, I am not talking about special techniques like Slow Death, where a curved bait is critical, but when it is meant to be straight, it has to be arrow straight or it doesn’t get wet.

We were reminded of this recently when we interviewed our good friend and bass fishing biologist, Barry Corbett on our Doc Talks Fishing podcast.  Corbett was the biologist in charge of one of the most extensive bass tracking studies in history, when he surgically implanted radio transmitters inside 38 large smallmouth bass and then followed them on a daily basis, throughout the season, for up to five years, or until the batteries finally stopped sending out individual radio frequencies.

He tracked the fish, even in the winter, and I was fortunate to accompany him one day when we discovered a massive smallmouth bass wintering area. Wanting to know how vulnerable the fish were in the winter, Corbett drilled a hole over the location, lowered down an underwater camera and carefully counted 64 different bass. Then I dropped down a small soft plastic minnow skewered onto a jig to see if they would bite it.

“We could watch them,” Corbett recalled on the podcast, “and you would watch two bass approach the bait. And then one would decide, okay, you can have it.  And I would tell you when to set because they weren’t overly aggressive.  And when you pulled the fish up, the other fish would follow it, watching it go up.  I should add that all of the fish were released back onto the site. We wanted to demonstrate how vulnerable they are in the winter.

“And I remember one time, you were using a finesse minnow and it was bent slightly.  Somehow it just didn’t go on the hook properly.  And the fish came up, they had a look at it and they swam away. And then when you brought it up and repositioned the bait, they took it immediately. I was surprised how discerning they were about it.”

Discerning is hardly the word, because the bass would not touch the soft plastic minnow when it was rigged the least bit askew. But every time I re-straightened it, they ate it without hesitation. Long story short: I caught and released in a matter of a few short minutes 62 of the bass that Corbett first counted.

You can listen to the entire absorbing podcast with Barry Corbett by clicking HERE and the next time you go fishing—for bass, walleye, muskies, pike or trout—remember the words of Bob Seeger’s hit song, “Like a Rock.” Position your soft plastic arrow straight and you’ll come chargin’ from the gate.