The lure of weightless soft plastics can turn on a tough summer bite.
Plastic lures have made a big splash in recent years. While most fishermen like to mount their plastic offerings onto jigheads, I have explored a different approach when using plastics. I call it my “finesse approach”.
I like to fish a variety of plastics weightless, a technique that even fussy stripers find irresistible at times. Weightless plastics come to life in the water with subtle twitches of your rod tip while reeling slowly causing these plastics to swim alluringly and dart around just like the real thing.
Especially in the warmer months of the year when the fish turn picky, weightless plastics just might be your key to catching. They can be cast as well as trolled from a boat or kayak using light tackle.
Going Weightless
Weightless plastics can be defined as a plastic body with just a hook imbedded in it. There is no weight component. Certain plastic offerings lend themselves to being fished weightless. These include fluke-like bodies such as a Lunker City Fin-S Fish or Zoom Flukes as well as other generic fish imitating bodies. Weightless also works with skinny plastics such Slug-Go’s or Albie Snax. However, this idea of weightless plastics does not seem to work well with paddletail bodies; the lures tend to twist on the retrieve unless there is weight to keep them upright. In my opinion, paddletails best suited for being mounted on a jighead.
Two key ingredients come into play when going weightless; the hook and the plastic body. I have experimented greatly with the hook. Most hooks that are used with plastic bodies fall into two categories. These are swimbait hooks such as the BKK Titanrider or Hogy Swimbait Hooks and wide gap worm hooks such as a Gamagatsu EWG (#58415). I have used both types with success and find that both are effective fish catchers. The big difference is that the swimbait hook has a screw-lock up front that screws into the head of the plastic offering, making for a more secure and durable connection. The swimbait hook will conserve your plastic bodies so that you won’t have to change them as often when catching. The plastic tends to rip out more easily on wide gap worm hooks when catching multiple fish. Both types of hooks have equal hooking power when it comes to catching.
You can purchase weighted swimbait hooks that have a thin sliver of lead molded onto the shank of the hook. I don’t use these. While they allow for a better cast, the added weight kills the action and the suspending qualities of a weightless-rigged bait which are the two main reasons for going this route. Some fishermen like to use these weighted hooks when fishing river or breachway currents.
The Right Baits
As far as bodies, size and color really come into play. When fishing from shore, you might want to go with a bigger body for a better cast. For that reason, I stock a number of different size flukes from 5 to 7 inches in my bag along with a number of different sizes of Slug-Go’s. As always, the wind at your back is better when fishing these light offerings from shore. I also tend to favor light colors. After much experimentation, I have found that white, bone and albino colors are your best bets. I have also done well in recent years with a Zoom Super Fluke (5 inches) in a white body with a chartreuse tail.
I have had great success using weightless plastics from my kayak. I like to get into an area and troll these just to find the fish. My set-up is a light 7-foot inshore rod with a BG 4000 reel spooled with 30-pound test Power Pro braided line. I tie a three foot section of 30-pound mono leader at the terminal end to which the plastic offering is attached with a line clip. I usually put out one outfit with a fluke-type body and another with a skinny plastic body. I have two rod holders on the yak, and I just pedal my Old Town Sportsman kayak until I start getting hits. Trolling is deadly in shallower locations, say, under 8 feet deep.
Stop & Cast
Once I find a body of fish, I tend to stop and cast while drifting. The technique when casting these lures is a slow retrieve with an occasional twitch of the rod tip. Stopping the lure and letting it rest momentarily, suspended in place, also elicits a lot of hits. Last year, I found a bunch of fish in late summer in one of my ‘Gansett Bay kayaking hotspots. The bait there was peanut bunker. Due to the warm water and the big amounts of bait, the fish were fussy and would not hit standard hard plugs. My most effective lure was a 5.75-inch white Lunker City Fin-S Fish. I would cast it and slowly twitch it, but it was when I stopped reeling that was when the fish would generally hit.
Over the course of multiple outings in a one-month period, I landed well over 100 stripers and a lot of bluefish using weightless plastics. Many of those stripers were slots and even over-slots of 40 inches and larger. That’s how effective this was. All these fish were released in good shape as the single hook provided easy, quick and relatively harmless releases.
The weightless game is best played with stripers. But, I’m sure you won’t be surprised to hear that bluefish also love these offerings and will mercilessly cut your plastics in half or worse yet, take the whole thing after slicing the leader. I can tolerate some losses due to bluefish but when I find a lot of blues, I switch to hard plugs. Blues tend to take the hard stuff better than finicky stripers in warm water, anyway.
I used this same weightless approach last year many times in Narragansett Bay as well as along the oceanfront. In the Bay, I continued to twitch flukes on top especially where I found schools of peanut bunker. Along the oceanfront I was using skinny plastic (7.5- or 9-inch) Slug-Go’s at night to catch numbers of stripers. I used black and white Slug-Go’s at night and both colors seemed to work with equal effectiveness.
Tricks Of The Trade
Here is one other trick that I use a lot from shore. When the wind is howling in my face and a long cast with weightless plastic is impossible, consider running your offering off a wooden egg float. Set up your float with about 3 feet of heavy (30-pound) mono off the end of the float onto which your plastic body is tied. I’ve done really well when stripers were on small, skinny bait like bay anchovies or silversides in rough conditions using the float with a 4- or 5-inch Zoom Fluke.
When the water turns warm and the bait runs small, the stripers can sometimes become mighty fussy. That’s when I often turn to a finesse approach using weightless plastics. It works from shore, boat and kayak. It can be a game changer when the warm waters of the New England summer make for a fussy bite with stripers.
