Topic: How to Catch Trout on Soft Plastics (Read 35 times)
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You’d be hard pressed to find a bass fisherman anywhere in the country who doesn’t have a healthy amount of soft-plastic tube baits in their arsenal. These hollow, skirted jigs can represent a wide variety of forage depending on the color you’re using. In brown, orange, and olive, they are one of the best imitators of a live crayfish ever made. These crustaceans are a favorite food of largemouth and smallmouth bass, but trophy brown trout slurp them up, too.
Trout munch crayfish all season long, though they often key in on them the hardest during the fall and winter when aquatic bug activity wanes. The fun part about fishing tubes for trout is that little fish aren’t usually as keen to go after a 3- or 4-inch live crayfish, so when you do feel your bait get sucked off the bottom of the river, it’s usually a pretty hefty trout on the other end.
The Strike King Bitsy Tube in pumpkin-green flake is the bait I lean on most often for trout. At 2 ¾-inches, it’s a little less of a mouthful but still big enough to represent a full-grown crayfish and entice the heavy hitters. Like swimbait heads, use the lightest tube jighead you can get away with to tick the bottom. Trout streams and rivers are generally shallower and rocky, and too heavy of a head will result in a less natural presentation and a lot more snags.
There’s no wrong part of a river to fish a tube, though they shine in areas with slower current where the bottom is made up of larger rocks and silt or mud. This is simply because crayfish gravitate to these areas, often avoiding fast current, and trout will move into these locations looking for a crunchy meal.
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Drop shotting is rooted in the bass world, and the technique was developed to fool pressured fish and sluggish fish in colder water. The rig starts with a drop shot weight at the end of your line. A few inches to a foot above the weight, a dropper loop in the leader creates a short arm perpendicular to the main line. This short arm holds the hook and a soft-plastic lure, and the idea is to keep this rig shaking in place, allowing the lure to dance and quiver, until a non-co*mittal fish decides to strike. The technique is practiced most often from a boat so you can drop straight down, but in the right situation, drop shotting is highly effective on a trout stream.
You know that deep, slow hole on your home river? The one where you think the biggest, wisest trout live—the ones that rarely make a mistake? Drop shotting is how you’re going to fool them. Instead of working lures through the hole, which forces fish to move and chase, drop shotting lets you keep a bait in the zone long enough to entice a bite via action or by goading territorial trout into striking just to kill the intruder.
Almost any slim profile soft-plastic in the 2- to 4-inch range can work on a drop shot rig, but I’m a big fan of LIVETARGET’s Ghost Tail Minnow. I’ll pin the bait right through the nose with a size 1 or 2 drop shot hook, cast my rig up current, and let it settle into the hole. Once I know it’s firmly planted on the bottom, I’ll gently shake the rod tip to get the bait twitching. After 30 seconds or so, I’ll lift the weight to advance the rig down the pool and start again. When a big trout hammers a drop shot bait, you won’t miss it.
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