Wacky Worming for Bass with a Fly Rod

I try to use flies whenever I fish, but sometimes I'll commit a heresy like fishing Wacky Style. Maybe it still is fly fishing; regardless of the semantics, this is how I do it.

Wacky style means to stick the hook through the center of gravity of a plastic bait. Senko worms are the famous bait for this, but I had at least as much success with plastic lizards and any plastic worm on sale and some centipedes my buddy got in a tackle box he bought at a garage sale. I even have used half of a worm with good success such as when I am getting low on ammunition or when the worm is falling apart from catching too many bass. I will use some plastic crawdads this spring and expect to have success with those. This style doesn't make sense to a human and that must be why it's called "wacky". The hook is extremely visible and realism doesn't seem to have anything to do with it. It is a great experience which teaches us that fish are really looking at things a lot different than we typically think. Why would a lizard swim sideways under water?

Now that you have the hook through the middle of the plastic bait, don't use any weight as long as the rig sinks in the water. I want to have it sink very slowly. I don't have any trouble with a floating line. You could change lines or add a sixty foot tippet of ten pound test line if you want to get it to sink. The first time I used one, I threw the worm five feet from my float tube and let it sink about 10 feet while I was talking to my buddy about how slow the fishing was. The line was rather slack and after one minute of the worm dangling I had a three pound bass on. They really try to swallow it and it isn't necessary to instantly set the hook.

It is a great technique with spinning and bait casting equipment too, but I learned a weird cast with my fly rod that I use. I let out about twenty feet of line and twirl the worm in a circle like a cowboy getting ready to throw a lasso. Let's call it a cowboy cast. I sometimes cowboy cast clockwise and sometimes counterclockwise and then let go and let some line slide out the guides as the worm flies out. I really like to throw it within a couple feet of the shore along a dam wall or a steep bank and let it drift down and towards my float tube which is about thirty feet away from the shoreline. I just try to take up a lot of the slack as it comes towards me and it takes about a minute or two to get directly below my tube and I usually let it hang down there limp for about a half minute. I twitch it every once in awhile thinking that the pressure disturbance of the twitch will call attention to it as a fish feels pressure changes with its lateral line. My twitch rate is about every ten seconds

You can use split shot and other ways of rigging, but I recommend that you start without any weight and make sure the bait is pierced by the hook at the center of gravity just so all your old theories of fish attraction challenged. My buddy and I couldn't help and laugh the rest of the day as we tried all kinds of plastic baits rigged wacky style and the bass kept biting like crazy. I used this technique the rest of the season with killer results. I always catch and release so the barbs on the hook are flattened yet the fish still hang on.

An hour and a half before dark I switch to poppers and bounce the rocks.