Guides / Techniques
Techniques and rigs
How each rig is built and fished: when it wins, what it wants underneath it, and what to change when the water changes.
Techniques
18 pagesNed rig
A mushroom jig head and a short, buoyant stick bait. It catches cold-water and pressured bass better than anything else in the box, and it is the first rig a river smallmouth angler should learn.
Texas rig
A bullet weight, a worm hook and a soft plastic with the point buried. It came out of the flooded brush of the new East Texas reservoirs in the late 1950s, and it is still the one to tie on when the fish are in something you would not throw an exposed hook into.
Carolina rig
A weight sliding on the main line, a bead and a swivel, then a leader and a hook trailing behind. The weight stays on the bottom and the bait floats free of it, which is why it is the rig for dragging a bait across open bottom where a Texas rig would simply sit.
Wacky rig
A stick bait hooked through the middle so both ends flutter on a slack-line fall. It is the shallow-water, clear-water, pressured-fish presentation, and it does its best work when you do almost nothing.
Streamer fishing
A streamer is the fly rod's baitfish, crayfish or sculpin, and the angler gives it its life. This page covers the line and leader the makers recommend, the retrieves the sources describe, how to set the hook without pulling the fly away, and where it fits on the Cumberland tailwater, Elkhorn Creek and Kentucky's stocked trout lakes.
Jig
A weighted head, a stout hook, a skirt and a weedguard. It is the oldest big-fish bait in the box, it goes where a crankbait cannot, and once you learn to read its bites it will catch bass from a Kentucky Lake ledge in July to a Dale Hollow flat in January.
Spinnerbait
A bent wire, a lead head, a skirt and one or two spinning blades. It looks like nothing a bass has ever eaten, and it has caught them for as long as most of us have been fishing, because the blades are doing the talking.
Crankbait
A hard body and a diving lip that pulls it down as you reel. You choose the depth when you tie it on, and the fish usually tell you what they think the moment the bait hits something.
Drop shot
A hook tied up the line and a weight on the bottom, so the bait hovers where the fish are instead of lying in the mud. It came out of Japan, the West Coast kept it quiet for years, and it is now the rig the pros reach for when nothing else gets bitten.
Shaky head
A light jig head, a thin worm with its point tucked back into the plastic, and a rod tip that barely moves. It is the rig that gets a bite when the fish will not eat anything else, and it has quietly won a great deal of tournament money while being called an idiot bait.
Slip float
A float that slides on the line and a knot that tells it where to stop. Cast it like a bobber set at two feet and fish it at twenty. It is the rig KDFWR names for winter crappie on deep cover, for summer bluegill, and for redear on the bottom.
Poppers and topwater flies
A bug sitting on flat water until the rings fade, then gone in a swirl. This page covers the rods and leaders the sources pair with poppers, sliders and foam spiders, the loop knot, the retrieves Orvis, Fly Fisherman and Kentucky's fisheries staff describe, the hours they name, and when to give up on the surface and go under.
Indicator nymphing
A nymph drifted near the bottom under a small float on the leader. It is how a KDFWR wildlife biologist fishes the Cumberland tailwater, and it is the rig the sources disagree about most in the details. This page builds it from the published instructions, prints the disagreements, and says when a dry-dropper or a tight line does the job better.
Dry-dropper
One floating fly on top, one nymph hanging below it on lighter line. This page explains what the rig does, builds it step by step, shows where the published advice agrees and where it does not, and says when to fish something else.
Boat control from a kayak
A kayak goes where the wind and the current send it unless you give it a reason not to. Four tools change that, an anchor on a trolley, a stake-out pole, a drift sock and the way you come at the water, and one rule sits over all of them: the boat end-on to the current, never broadside. This page takes each from the maker's or the agency's own words and labels the rest editorial.
Planning a creek float
A creek float is decided before the boat goes in: which two access points, how the car gets to the bottom one, what the gauge says against the window KDFWR publishes, and how many miles the day can hold. This page takes each from the agency's own words, prints what no agency says, and labels the rest editorial.
Wet wading and cold water
November is cold-water season on every creek and tailwater on this site. This page takes the thresholds from the people who publish them, the National Center for Cold Water Safety, the National Weather Service, the Coast Guard and the Corps, prints what no agency says, and labels the rest editorial.
Fly patterns for Kentucky tailwaters
What the state agency has actually put in print about flies for its tailwaters, column by column and year by year. Copper Johns, Hare's Ears, Prince Nymphs, zebra midges, Woolly Buggers and cork poppers, in the sizes and colors KDFWR named, with nothing filled in from shop copy. Where the agency is silent, this page says so.
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