Editor’s note: I had my mind blown eight years ago when, at a sport show, a rather highly regarded fly fisher and tyer revealed to me her go-to pattern for when, she said, “all else fails.” It was basically a small, bizarrely-colored leech pattern that incorporated a curving, rubberlike grub tail (also known as a pig’s tail for its curly shape). Such tails are common in conventional-tackle warmwater angling, and this fly could have doubled as a crappie lure if it had been tied on a jig hook. It certainly resembled nothing found in nature. I was intrigued — here was someone obviously willing to go beyond fur and feathers and employ a design element well known to conventional-tackle anglers, but that would probably be seen as heretical by more than a few fly fishers.
Soft plastic “ baits,” as lures are known in the conventional-tackle world, provide both lifelike motion and, when bit, a lifelike feel in the fish’s mouth. Nearly weightless in small sizes, they can be presented easily with a fly rod, and as with grub tails, can also easily be tied into a fly pattern, like my friend’s odd leech. We fly fishers have been fiddling for years now with foam and other artificial materials, so it’s sensible that we also explore the benefits that soft plastics might hold for our sport. In fact, it has already been happening. My fly-tyer friend is not alone in her experimentation.
Let me take you on a little adventure back through the mists of time. I promise that once we come full circle, your mind will be aswirl with new offerings and new tactics to employ during upcoming fly-fishing expeditions.
It’s 1983, and I’m 16 years old. I’m an avid angler and hunter. I’ve been fly fishing for a few years and have already started tying and selling flies to folks throughout the Bay Area.
I’m standing out in front of the old Castro Valley Sportsman’s Center. For anglers living in the East Bay, the place was iconic. They offered everything from live bait to tuna tackle, fly-tying supplies to duck decoys, and more. Unlike the antiseptic big-box sporting goods stores we have today, the Sportsman’s Center had character. It even had its own smell, a combination of bait, mildew, dust, and possibility.
On this day, when I walked in and headed back to the fly-tying stuff, I noticed a big canvas tarp with a pile of junk and debris on it. Amid the clutter, I spotted two boxes stuffed full of issues of both Field & Stream and Outdoor Life spanning the period from the late 1950s to the early 1970s. I immediately asked the owner what he was going to do with them.
“We’re remodeling in the back and tossing out a lot of old stuff. You can have them, if you want them,” he said.
They were mine — magazines from the golden era, with articles by Ben East, Jack O’Connor, Ted Trueblood, and others. I pored over them, reveling in outdoor adventures from days gone by and making mental notes on the adventures I might one day experience.
When I was growing up, bass fishing and plastic worms went together like peanut butter and jelly, but that hadn’t always been the case. In one of those old issues of Field & Stream there was an article by a guy who had heard all the buzz about the new-fangled Crème worm and took a couple out to his home lake to run past the bass. These weren’t the soft, seductive worms we have today. These were the original, somewhat stiff rubber worms that came pre-rigged with a pair of small gold hooks, beads, and a little metal propeller on the nose. The Texas Rig that has been a standard for bass anglers for decades had yet to be contemplated.
Long story shorter, the guy enjoyed tremendous success, as many others had. Just like that, soft plastics changed the sport of bass fishing.
Plastics for Trout
Fast-forward to the 2000s. I’m all grown up now and owner/editor of the Fish Sniffer magazine. While bass fishing certainly never was my specialty, I’ve enjoyed it and often have been invited to hit the water with a long list of very talented bass pros. When you hang around with those people, you learn quickly that bass pros are the best anglers and best boaters fishing our inland lakes.
To start the day, bassers toss a wide array of sexy offerings. Some go with spinnerbaits, while others rip baits, and the true trophy junkies toss massive trout-pattern swimbaits. All these guys and girls typically catch some fish early, but as the sun gets up and the fish drop down in the water column, the sexy baits get put away, and the soft plastics come out in the form of worms and tubes, curly-tailed grubs, and concoctions with legs and flippers known as creature baits.
They slather these chunks of soft plastic with scent, drag them on or near the bottom, and voilà, bass big and small start coming into the boat. I’ve seen it more times than I can remember. Soft plastics are the staple bait of bass pros nationwide. (Editor’s note: applying scent is frowned upon when fly fishing, as doing so is too similar to using natural bait and thus antithetical to the spirit of the sport.)
We who chase trout at the same reservoirs where the bass anglers chase bass must not be very bright. We know that the bass living in a reservoir such as Lake Shasta or Folsom or Camanche eat the same threadfin shad and pond smelt as the trout we target. And we know soft plastics are a staple with the bass-fishing pros. Yet we don’t use soft plastics. Why? Well duh! Soft plastics are bass baits, and we are fishing for trout.
A predator is a predator, though, and if two different kinds of predatory fish are eating the same prey, doesn’t it stand to reason that you can catch both species on the same basic baits?
It took years for this revelation to dawn for me. Sure, conventional-tackle trout trollers occasionally pull plastic hoochies or grubs, but they never have used them in the same systematic way as plugs and spoons.
When the idea of seriously employing soft plastics for trout really hit me, I was cleaning some trout I’d caught. I felt something big and squishy in one’s belly. “Hmmm,” I thought, “I bet that’s some sort of plastic worm,” because I find trout with plastic bass baits in their bellies all the time.
Removing the object confirmed I was correct. It was a 4-inch green Senko, but it was very deteriorated. It looked like it might have been in the lake for months before the trout gulped it down. A lot of the plastics I found looked that way. “I think this trout just randomly found the Senko, maybe moving a bit from wave action or current, picked it up, and when it felt real, swallowed it,” went my thought process, and the light bulb clicked on. Perhaps the same qualities making soft plastics top offerings for bass would make them effective for trout.
Why Plastics?
That moment started me on a three-year odyssey. As a trout-fishing guide, I hate playing follow the leader. If everyone else is pulling Bait A, I make sure to pull Bait B. When fish see the same lure repeatedly, it becomes less effective, so I always try to present the trout with something novel, something they don’t see every day, all day long, something not like a Rapala or a Needlefish or a Kastmaster.
Truth be told, most of the large rainbows my clients land, fish from 6 to 12 pounds, are hooked on trolling flies. I pull them because they are awesome baitfish imitations, but also because far fewer anglers are pulling flies compared with minnow plugs and spoons.
When I started trying to put together a strategy for trout using soft plastics, the first thing I considered is why soft plastics work. Why do predators eat them? I settled on three factors that I feel are unique to soft plastic baits.
First, they feel real when fish strike them. This encourages them to strike a soft plastic bait multiple times if they partially miss it on the first strike.
Second, soft plastics have a very realistic look, whether it’s a worm-shaped bait or a minnow shape. Soft baits can be made in a wide range of colors and virtually any color combination. This means you can match the color of your offering to any water condition from clear to cloudy, shallow to deep. Soft baits also can be made with glitter incorporated into the plastic, giving them a very subtle, yet very lifelike flash, just like a live baitfish.
Finally, soft plastics move very fluidly in the water, maintaining their shape while still being extremely flexible. They twist and undulate in ways reminiscent of the way live bait moves. The combination of these three traits produces a bait that both looks and feels real.
However, a lot of the soft baits offered to bass anglers are simply too big for trout. I needed to find size appropriate baits for trout. Trouters have been trolling 2-inch and 3-inch curly-tail grubs for a long time. When grubs work, they work great, but they don’t always work. I needed to add other shapes and actions to my arsenal beyond the frantic swimming tail action provided by grubs. In the end, I settled on a slim-profile 3-inch worm and a 2.5-inch minnow-shaped bait similar to the drop-shot baits many bass anglers use when finesse fishing.
It didn’t take me long to figure out how to rig these baits for trolling. Based on the number of trout I started hooking, I knew I was on to something. The minnow baits and worms would catch trout when the bite was off and the trout were showing little or no interest in other offerings.
Casting Soft Plastics
The next challenge I took on was figuring out how to present my deadly soft baits without trolling them. I wanted to able to cast and retrieve the baits, and I also wanted to employ a natural, vertical falling or dead-drift presentation in moving water.
I did my first experiments with spinning gear. Since the baits were too light to cast very far without added weight, I played with both clear bobbers filled with water and split shot applied to the line. Both methods worked, but last spring, I had another soft plastic trout epiphany. I notice some rainbows cruising around the docks where my boat was berthed, so out came the spinning rod and the soft baits. I hooked a few of the cruising trout, but the spinning rod was makeshift, at best. If I added enough split shot to facilitate casting, I had to move the baits too fast to keep them from plummeting out of the strike zone. If I used the bobber, I had to drag a big, fish-spooking bobber through the strike zone.
I needed casting distance combined with a light touch to sight fish for the rainbows. Why not use a fly rod to present the baits?
On my next trip to the lake, I tossed a 7-weight fly rod into the truck, matched with a reel spooled with a standard tapered floating line. When I got to the water, I rigged it up with a 9-foot fluorocarbon leader tapering down to 6-pound test, went to work . . . and was disappointed by the results.
I could cast the baits a good distance and make a pretty subtle presentation. The problem was that the baits wouldn’t stay in place on the hook due to the G forces created during the cast, which are much greater than when casting a spinning rod. What to do?
My first inclination was to tie the baits onto the hook, but I didn’t have any fly-tying gear with me. Then I remembered a trick a bass pro had shown me a decade and a half before. He was using a worm that was torn up and wouldn’t stay on the hook. He solved the problem by gluing the worm back together with superglue and gluing it in place on the hook. Off to the store I went for a tube of glue.
I glued some minnow baits in place on the hooks and worked them horizontally through the water like a streamer. For a vertical, dead-drop presentation, I “wacky rigged” some worms on an octopus-style hook and locked them in place on the hook with superglue. You wacky rig a soft plastic worm by running the hook through the bait in the middle so that the ends flop around, then hit it with the glue — it’s that simple.
Casting the baits was definitely more challenging than tossing a size 14 nymph. The plastics caught a lot of air, but no more than a traditional streamer or large Muddler.
Before long, casting from the docks, I was smacking rainbows that ranged up to about four pounds, along with a sprinkling of bass and crappies. Other folks were trying for the spooky rainbows, too, but not catching much on spinners, spoons, crappie jigs, or even on live worms or salmon eggs.
What I was doing was simple. I was using fly tackle to make a stealthy presentation with baits the fish were completely unfamiliar with. When curiosity got the better of the rainbows, they took a nip and ended up hooked.
The Baits
Right now, I’m pairing three different soft baits with my fly rod, including 1-inch, 2-inch, and 3-inch curly-tail grubs, 3-inch worms, and 2.5-inch minnow baits. I’m satisfied that I’ve got the basics covered with this collection.
When you go out looking for soft plastic baits to toss on a fly rod, you’ve got to understand that you are on the frontier of something new, so you aren’t going to walk into the store and find what you need prepackaged and ready to go. Small minnow imitations are easy to find, because bass anglers use them as drop-shot baits. You’re just looking for a soft bait with a realistic, minnow-shaped body in the 2-to-2.5-inch range. Small grubs are also widely available at most tackle shops and online.
Small worms can be challenging to find, though. I call my 3-inch worms Trout Trix Worms and sell them online. Berkley makes some great small worms, as does the Trout Magnet Company. Brand doesn’t matter, however. What you want is a thin plastic worm that is roughly 3 inches long.
(Editor’s note: other anglers have had similar epiphanies about using soft plastics to create worm flies for trout. Dave Hise, of Hickory, North Carolina, came up with the Squirmy Wormy, a version of the San Juan Worm tied using a silicon tentacle from the kids’ toy Puffer Ball, and now you can buy Squirmy Wormy material, and even the fly itself, also known as a Gummy Worm, at many fly shops. Tying instructions for the Squirmy Wormy are easily found online.)
Across all three bait types, I like to have some natural colors, as well as some bright stuff. For me, natural-colored minnow baits have outperformed the bright ones. On the other hand, bright-colored worms and grubs have sometimes gotten better results than the more subtle colors. One of my most productive soft baits so far is a bright-pink bubble-gum-colored worm. I’ve caught both planted trout and wild trout on the pink worm.
Rigging
I’ve been using two different types of hooks to rig the baits. For the minnow and grubs, I’m running Mustad 3366-BR bronze ring-eye hooks through the bodies. In situations when I want to move a worm horizontally in the water column, I run these hooks with worms too. I match the length of the hook, usually size 4 or 6, with the length of the bait, and I’m good to go. These are just basic bronze hooks, but they hook and hold. I’ve also bent them out on snags, and I’ve been able to bend them back into shape.
When dead-drifting worms or dropping them vertically using a wacky-style rigging, I’ve been using a size 4 red Eagle Claw L2 octopus needle-point hook. This hook is constructed of light wire, but it’s very strong with a large bite, and it hooks well.
You’ll need a tube of superglue for securing the baits to the hooks and for repairing baits when you get into a hot bite. You’ll also need a selection of micro removable fly-fishing split shot, because some plastic baits sink readily, but others have neutral buoyancy. One or two tiny split shot are sufficient to get these baits to sink slowly. For deeper presentations, though, I’d rather switch to a sinking line than add a bunch of weight to the leader.
In streams, when dead-drifting plastic baits, you might want to add an indicator to your rig. I’m old school and rarely use an indicator when nymphing. Instead, I’m a line watcher. Go with what works for you.
The Presentation
On still waters, I fish the grubs and minnows the same way I’d fish a streamer, with a strip, strip, pause, strip, strip, strip retrieve. Sometimes I’m doing this while sight fishing to cruising trout and sometimes I’m probing deeper in the water column for fish I can’t see. Some of these baits having a rolling action when retrieved. Don’t be alarmed. The sight of a rolling minnow really trips the predatory response in trout and other game fish. It’s like a blinking light that says, “Baitfish in Distress.”
As I noted earlier, if you need to get down in the water column, employ a sinking line just the way you’d use a sinking line to get a streamer down. If I’m blind fishing, I tend to work around points and drop-offs. Trout and other predators looking to feed on baitfish like to lurk around structure and/or crowd the bait up against structure.
If I’m fishing worms, I may move the worms horizontally in the water, but most of the time, I like to hook them wacky style and let them drop vertically. You can employ this approach while sight fishing or in open water. It also works around structure. Depending on the lake you are fishing and the time of the year, you can often count on catching as many bass using this presentation as trout. This is exactly the same way bass anglers fish wacky-rigged Senkos, and it’s deadly. There is something about that slowly sinking worm that game fish love.
When fishing wacky, resist the urge to add action with the rod or line. Just let the bait drop while watching the line. If the line jumps, moves, or stops unnaturally, set the hook. When you think the worm has reached the bottom of the strike zone, shake the worm a bit before retrieving it and making another cast.
In streams, think in terms of streamer tactics when presenting minnows and grubs. Cast across the current, let the bait sink a bit, then swing it across the current on a tight line. When it’s directly below your position, let it squirm in the current for several seconds, then bring it back using a strip-and-pause retrieve. Strikes can come at any point throughout the presentation. Worm-style soft plastics, conversely, should be dead-drifted near the bottom of the stream. Try them, too, during high water, when natural worms are likely adrift in the water column.
Experiment
The approach I’ve outlined is just a place to start. Targeting trout with soft plastics is in its infancy, and that’s doubly true when it comes to fly fishing. Experimentation is the key to perfecting new baits, presentations, and techniques. If you see a new bait you think might pay dividends or imagine an approach or rigging that makes sense for you, give it a try out on the water. The trout are the final arbiters of what works and what doesn’t. Heck, trout will hit a pink Rooster Tail Spinner with a giant chrome spinning blade, so the sky is the limit when it comes to experimenting. When you are on the water, always experiment, and always have fun!
