We first broke the ice on the swimbait bite on the White River in what was documented in our film Southern Trout Eaters. Now, two summers later, we are living on the White and spending a whole lot more time and energy to really dial in the fish. We have a long way to go. Fishing in current is a new challenge in itself. The above is a short clip of an approx. 26-27″ trophy brown trout caught near Cotter, Arkansas, on the 8″ Huddleston Deluxe Rainbow Trout swimbait, using our Southern Trout Eaters Huddleston Rig, with the added gill modification, ROF 12. We got some nice footage of the release and just wanted to share our ‘personal best’ with you. It isn’t often you wake up at 5am with swimbait fishing on your mind when the calendar tells you it’s July and the forecast is well into the 100+ degree mark. But that is what happens when you understand some of the nuances of Southern swimbait fishing. Trout Eaters are where you find them.
The Southern Trout Eaters rig works well with brown trout I’m finding. Like bass, big brown trout don’t always inhale the bait or eat it head first. Lots of swipes, kisses and short bites by those super smart brownies. ST-66 treble hooks are perfect for the rock hard bone razor teeth laden mouths of trophy brown trout.
Trophy Trout are not easy to catch or hold onto for a picture. Notice the size of the head and jaws vs. the rest of the body. A cool 104 degree July afternoon in Arkansas, contrasted by 58 degree water temps in the mighty White River.
The 3:16 Rising Son Jr. is a sleeper swimbait and is great for certain applications. I realized I’d been overlooking this bait as part of my tournament and trophy arsenal this past winter in Okeechobee. You are going to have to be patient, I have an Okeechobee sessions thing I’m working on that will shed a lot more information and clarity as to why the Rising Son Jr. works so well in some situations, and some insights into how I fish and rig it. I know this is one of Mickey’s most popular softbaits and for good reason, it comes in great colors, swims incredibly well at fast and slow speeds, and fishes good around hard and soft cover. Fish bite it.
Exactly. The tail ‘licks’ the surface, the body straightens out, and the bait gets into perfect trim when you get a good swim lane and a feel for the tempo of fishing it.Almost a great shot. Lens glare got me. Single Owner ST-41 Treble hooks and zero metal inside the bait/as part of the harness = very buoyant.The body is bulbous. It has a nice tear drop shape that gives it volume, and of course the tail just twists and shouts back there. Mickey’s boot tails are known to get bites and create lift.
My buddy, Chad Johnson, sight fishing carp on a fly rod. Notice the egg pattern looks a whole lot like a piece of corn. Arkansas is an excellent place to fish, year round.
Fly fisherman make it a point to educate themselves on how to tie bugs and streamers that ‘match the hatch’ but as the younger crew of fly fisherman come of age, they are showing it’s not all about barbless size 20 single hooks. Big fish eat big baits and you better be prepared if you want to land them. Streamer fishing, White River, Arkansas
Chad Johnson, brown trout, ‘hopper dropper’. Come get you some.
Dinosaurs are fun to catch, especially with fly rods, you don’t even need hooks.
I’m fishing for a 30+ pound brown trout that eats stocked rainbow trout. Keep it Soft Stupid (KISS)
Kids Fishing Derby, big fish winner. Kid was stoked, and Dad was too. The “Friends of the Hatchery”, Corp of Engineers, and a host of other puts on a kids fishing derby every year at the Norfork River/Dry Run Creek confluence adjacent to the Norfork National Fish Hatchery. Free event for the kids and just fun to help out and volunteer.
“Light Trout” is so 2005. Get with it, Pink Bass is the shizzle.
Canoes, wet wading, and swimbait fishing. Me gusta.
The Grass Minnow has proven itself to me in the grass. Shallow grass lakes of the South East. As I spend more time in the Arkansas Ozarks, I am broadening my application of the Grass Minnow. The warm and cold water creeks and rivers that feed the Ozarks are full of smallmouth and largemouth, and trout. So, it’s not the heavy grass fishing, but it is more a finesse approach, but still a real swimbait approach. I’m fishing the Grass Minnow much like I currently fish the 3″ Big Hammer. Yes, a spinning rod. Wet wading, aloha colored swimming trunks, oversized sunglasses, big hat and Buff covering my face, walking or floating a few miles of river here and there. Getting some exercise and just trying to do it all. The Shimano Cumara 7’2″ Rod + 15 pound Power Pro Braid + 3 feet of Yamamoto Sugoi 10# floro are working really well for me which is crazy to have a bait that fishes well on 50 # braid and GLoomis 964 BBR (Okeechobee style) and now I’m fishing it on a spinning rod. The Huddleston Vortex continues! The Grass Minnow is just an extremely real looking and swimming bait, and I’m realizing cannot be pigeon holed into being just a grass bait by any stretch.
How many zillions of minnows are there in our lakes and rivers? Little narrow looking fishes with forked tails. Fish tend to bite the Grass Minnow. With the right equipment and hookset, you’ll land your bites.
The Grass Minnow is a pretty sophisticated little candy morsel of a swimbait. The bait is flat sided, has a unique swallow tailed vortex tail, yet the belly and shoulders are full and bulbous, so the bait has the classic Huddleston water displacement and push that we’ve gotten hooked on with his 8″ Trout. Sometimes people discuss what is the definition of a swimbait, and where you draw lines, etc. Sophistication trumps size in this case. The Huddleston Deluxe Grass Minnow is a swimbait you need to learn. I now have a heavy grass assault (ie, Okeechobee), sparse grass assault (ie, Champlain) and river fish (Ozark) application for this bait. You have to be good to really understand, fully leverage, and fish this bait properly. It’s fairly easy to swim, yet if you want to slow down, pause, dead stick and finesse fish with it, it does that too very well. In shallow rivers, I’m finding it an alternative to the little tube where you can sorta hop/drag/swim it, and skip it under trees and into shade pockets which tends to be where fishes live in shallow low water Arkansas.
The Grass Minnow fishes well on the drop and can be dragged/hopped, like the 3″ Big Hammer, except its ROF 5 vs ROF 30 respectively (approx). The Grass Minnow is very neutral buoyant and falls nice and slow and graceful. It has a hollow midsection, used as part of the weedless design, that also gives the bait an internal bladder. The bait falls and orients nose down and just drags nicely over hard bottom. It’s not just an excellent grass bait.
So, here’s the hookset with a spinning rod: Tighten up your drag, so line doesn’t come off when you set the hook. Point your rod tip at the fish when you get a bite and reel down until you feel tension of the fish at the reel and once you make really good contact with the reel>line>fish, put the rod into the mix and lift up hard with the rod and drive the hook home and maintain a good strong constant pressure as you move the fish and rod a few feet to really pin the fish. Reel hard and heavy get maximum pressure as you swing the rod to set. I could probably get away with a slightly heavier spinning rod than I’m using, perhaps the MH vs. the M model. I am surprised how well it is fishing for me and hooking fish. I am pretty converting a bunch of my stuff over to braid + leader setups, it just works great for me and my style of fishing. This is another instance where braid provides something that couldn’t be done with mono or floro (fish a weedless Huddleston bait on a spinning rod, and still be able to hook fish).
Grass is where you find it. Weedless baits sometimes fish really well without weeds. Just like some non-weedless baits fish really well in weeds. A softbait without a top hook sticking out, treble hook hanging or sticking out, or trap rig of any kind. Just a clean real bait, sans hook. It looks really good in the water and fishes super clean.Yes, that is a spinning rod. The Grass Minnow fishes amazingly well with the spinning rod. Braided line gives me the hookset I need, and the floro leader helps me get bit in uber clear skinny water. But boy, they eat it. Weedless swimbaits fish really nicely in all waters, but around current, where your bait can tumble/ deadstick and hop and stroll, that’s where not having a hook or any exposed hardware really pays off and gives ’em a different look, keeps your bait free from muck, and is a much more refined approach, especially in clean water. Stay tuned, this whole spinning rod swimbait thing is still being tested, but appears to be excellent.
The 5″ Big Hammer is a workhorse swimbait plain and simple. Born in the Pacific Ocean, to catch calico, sand, and spotted bay bass the 5″ Big Hammer Swimbait is a unique bait that swims high and low, and with the exposed lead head design, provides you bottom contact and rate of fall few other swimbaits can match. The 5″ Big Hammer is one of the few swimbaits I can say I’ve consistently caught fish with in >15′ of water (speaking about non-trout fed tournament style lakes) off the bottom and fish that were suspended. The ledges of Kentucky Lake, for example, has deep schools of fish and I found the 5″ Big Hammer to be an excellent bait to catch them with. This Swim Signature Series piece is dedicated to showing the swim, hop and drag of the 5″ Big Hammer swimbait.
The 5″ Big Hammer Swimbait on a 3/4 Big Hammer Head. The 5″ Big Hammer swimbait is a swimmer but also a drop bait, a stroke bait, a vertical bait, and a dragging style swimbait. A well rounded swimbait, you might say. But the tail is anything but round. Known as the ‘square tail’ you can see the twist of tail and the ripple effect on the back half of the bait in the picture. Also, you can see the beautiful purple hue of the color, “Silver Phantom”.
I fish the 5″ Big Hammer on a 3/4 ounce Big Hammer Head with the 4/0 hook. That is the setup in the above swim signature series, where we are looking at the the Big Hammer as a swimmer, but also a dragger and a hopping bait too. The exposed lead head just gives you excellent touch and feel, to know hard and rock bottom vs. sand or muck, and dang it if the bait doesn’t sink out like a rock. Incredible rate of fall, even with a 3/4 ounce head (Big Hammer makes them up to 1.5 ounces). So, you can fish these thing DEEP and maintain excellent bottom contact.
Notice the pyramid head and shape of the Hammer head how well it orients a bait that sits on the bottom. For an exposed hook/top hook swimbait, the Big Hammer is amazing at getting thru rock and hard bottom/sand. Not so great around wood. The pyramid head shape with the line tie back off from the nose, is really good for swimming and for hopping and dragging. You don’t bang your knot into rocks as bad and you tend to be able to orient the bait up and pop it up and out of harms as you fish it out deeper.
I suggest fishing the 5″ Big Hammer swimbait on at least 20# mono. I fish the bait on 65# Power Pro braid tied to a 4 foot piece 20-25# of P-Line CXX Copolymer. I have excellent feel with the braided line, and get a good hook in the fish with the braid too. I have fished this setup lots of times successfully with just 17-20 pound mono/copolymer, and no braid, and this too is another setup I’m switching over as I slowly migrate all my swimbait baits to braid + leader. A faster action, not super fast, but not super slow, long rod is what you want to fish this bait. I like the Shimano Crucial 7’11” MH for the 5″ Big Hammer.
The 3:16 Lure Company Sunfish is a bait I reconnected with this year. I had fished it before, but after some sitting and thinking about some things, simplification and just expansion of the bigbait journey, I realized the bluegill/brim/sunfish space was something I needed to focus and commit to. I tied the 3:16 Sunfish and hit Okeechobee this past winter, and immediately picked up where I’d left off with the bait some years ago on places like Lake Otay. Let me be clear, you need a bluegill/brim/shellcracker/sunfish swimbait approach, especially around the spawn. So, the 3:16 Sunfish (and you should know that the 3:16 Bluegill is the exact same bait, just poured in a different color. Both baits are killer. I just like a little chartreuse and watermelon green in my life whenever possible), is a fish catcher.
The 3:16 Lure Company Sunfish. A great swimming bait, booted tail with lots of lift which helps get it up around shallow grass, yet, you can still sink it out and slow grind it back for a more mid water column retrieve. The bait can definitely be burned and it still runs amazingly true, as per the fast water section of the above video clip.
I fish the 3:16 Sunfish on a medium action 8 foot rod, moderate fast, parabolic style, 965 BBR G-Loomis Rod with a Calcutta 300 TE Reel. I am using 65 Pound Power Pro Braid (no mono leader as per in the video, yet….I’m still messing around but straight 65# braid is awfully good) and one single 1/0 ST-41 Owner Treble Hook. Why the ST-41? I feel like the ST-41 Treble Hooks are excellent when fish load up and just eat a bait. you don’t ‘skin hook’ or barely hook fish on the 3:16 Sunfish. They eat the whole damn thing. If I’ve only got one hook, and I’m getting 4-6+ fish, which is common, I need one strong hook and the ST-41 has worked well for me, especially when matched with 65# Braid. You could definitely use the ST-36 Owner Stinger Treble here too. I am constantly trying new things and just sorta testing and seeing what works and what doesn’t and found the single 1/0 ST-41 Treble Hook to match this bait and how I’m fishing it on braid really well.
Slashing and Burning. The tail of the 3:16 Sunfish and Bluegill is a ‘slasher’ as far as I’m concerned. It’s like a buzz saw. But it’s got a lot of twist in it too, so what do you call a twisting buzz saw? A twistbuzzstersaw. Say that 5 times fast!
The purpose of this Swim Signature series is to provide an underwater and slowed down look at various baits, big and small. Not to critique or necessarily ‘review’ the baits, at least, not yet. This is an objective, here is this bait swimming in the water look. You can form you own conclusions, but I suggest you might pick one or four of these 3:16 Sunfishes up. They are softbaits, they fish really well, you can catch a bunch of fish per bait, and you will see in some future productions, they catch nice size and numbers. For $12.99 you get a lot of bait that will be worth the money, and I’m about 99.99% sure your bait will run true, as per Mickey’s packaging and quality control standards. His baits just swim bang on out of the box. Bass inherently have a contentious relationship with the panfishes, which means they tend to eat them out of anger and hunger, which tells me I need to be throwing them, especially when trout are not an option.
What do Paul McCartney and the 3:16 Sunfish have in common? They both love to twist and shout. “You know you twist so fine!”
