Cheb-tastic! The only way to properly test something out is to actually fish with it and catch on it (long, slightly nerdy post!)

Ever heard of a cheburashka weight or cheb head/weight for short? You most likely have if you do any freshwater lure fishing, but saltwater anglers? If you have read this blog for a while I would hope that you have noticed how I like experimenting with my lure fishing. If bass fishing especially was chucking the same lures over the same type of ground all the time my interest would have waned a long time ago, as indeed it started to do with my bait fishing………………

I have obsessed about the (Savage Gear) Slender Scoop Shad (let’s call it the SSS for ease of typing) since I first rigged one onto a 6/0 weedless belly-weight hook and it caught me my first ever February bass last year. The powers that be at Savage Gear never even asked me to take a look at the lures because they were originally conceived for the freshwater market, but it became very quickly evident that their action in the water was giving me a different option to my Gravity Stick Paddletail or indeed any other paddletails which I might have rigged on weedless hooks. Not better I might add, just different, and they caught fish for me straight away which in turn gave me a lot of confidence that bass rather like them. I fish with them a lot these days, and we turn to them a lot with our anglers when we are guiding in Ireland as well.

When John Quinlan who I guide with in Ireland told me about how much more belly-roll he was seeing on the SSS when he rigged them on a weedless type of swimming jig head, that obviously piqued my interest big time. John’s business relies on him putting anglers onto fish, plus he is out there guiding for much of the year. When he says that something seems to be working a bit better for him and his clients I’d be a fool not to take serious notice. Some anglers ask a lot of questions and want to keep on learning and experimenting - me! - and some don’t. The world needs all kinds of people but I can’t pretend that I understand a lack of interest and wonder and urge to learn and know more. It takes all sorts I guess.

Anyway, so I told you about the SSS and weedless jig head stuff I started playing with and fishing with the other day, but as I alluded to when I went out to try this stuff and caught a bunch of bass - an amazing looking swimming action but the lures were ripping off the front of the jig head too easily when a bass hit it. So I went back to the drawing board and came up with what you can see above and what I talked about here the other day. It might not look as neat as “properly” rigging a lure on one of the weedless jig heads I bought, but I know from experience that corkscrews or hitch-hikers don’t half prolong the life of a soft plastic. Was there another option though?

I did a search of my emails and found out that I first bought some cheburashka weights (cheb heads or cheb weights for short) back in 2016 when a mate told me about them as a rather clever way to add weight to the front of a soft plastic for bumping down an estuary current. I don’t remember giving them much playing time because I was doing well enough with soft plastics rigged on jig heads already, but enough anglers have told me to go back to cheb heads and give them a proper go over the years. I always carry a selection of weedless hooks with me which have different weights of belly-weight to allow for different conditions and depths and currents and so on, but it is very noticeable how the weight at the front of the SSS (and not in the belly area) really increases the rolling action on them. Please note that I am not saying whether more roll is better or not, just that I seriously like the look of the lures swimming like this - which I hope translates to the bass liking it as well! Remember that Storm marketing slogan “think like a fish”? I am trying my best but I also know that if something lights my brain up I am more likely to fish with it. Which isn’t really thinking like a fish. I get that.

Due to my growing obsession with these soft plastic creature baits, I had bought a small selection of Vike Tungsten Cheb Weights from the rabbit hole that is Predator Tackle. I had initially found the original lead cheb weights I bought back in 2016 off some random Ebay seller, but when I took another look at them it became apparent that the metal paper clip style bit wasn’t nearly strong enough. Anything tungsten is more expensive of course, but I like how much smaller these tungsten cheb heads are, I am banking on not losing too many of them if at all possible, and the clips on the Vike ones I bought feel much stronger. If it’s any help, I have found another selection of cheb weights at Glasgow Angling, but I haven’t used any of them myself because I am so at day one with this specific stuff.

If you go down this route you will also notice that cheb weights don’t sit right with the way the eye of the hook sits upright on a weedless hook which has been designed to work with a corkscrew. You need to use regular weedless hooks unless I am missing something obvious. If I need to use a conventional weedless hook I tend to turn to the outstanding Varivas Gran Hooking Master (Monster Class!!) weedless hooks because they aren’t very expensive and they have never let me down. I use the 1/0, 2/0 and 3/0 versions for my lure based wrasse fishing, but I went rooting around for some larger ones I knew I had here somewhere. I did a bit of playing around - note how in the photo above that the way I have rigged the 15cm SSS causes the hook not to sit so far back in the body of the lure - and came up with a size 6/0 Varivas Gran Hooking Master Monster Class weedless hook as being just about right for both the 13cm and the 15cm size SSS. I also took delivery of a colour in these lures I had never seen before but which the photos in the catalogue and on the Savage Gear website doesn’t do proper justice to at all - Smelt. As per above. Help.

If these cheb heads don’t speak to you at all then so be it, but if you start thinking about how versatile this system can be with how easily you can change the weight of the cheb (jig) head and how differently you can fish with soft plastics rigged like this (swimming, bumping, sink and draw etc.), well that’s pretty interesting to me and my lure fishing junkie brain which again woke me up at 4am this morning thinking about it! Of course you don’t have to go screwing a corkscrew into the front of your lures because weedless hooks don’t actually need you to do this - photo above - but as I said further up, I like how corkscrews (which you can buy separately here) seriously lengthen the life of a soft plastic and also make for very easy lure changes if you have taken the time to prepare and screwed some corkscrews/hitch-hikers in beforehand. As per this blog post here.

But for all my thinking and rigging and waking up early, the only way to get any confidence in something a bit different to how you might usually do things is to take the stuff out fishing and actually fish with it instead of leaving it in your lure box and fishing with something else which you know far better - and then you need to catch on it. And I did this yesterday with the exact setup you can see above - a 14g Vike Tungsten cheb weight, a 6/0 Varivas Gran Hooking Master Monster Class weedless hook, and a 15cm Slender Scoop Shad. I chose a 14g cheb weight because I knew there would be a decent bit of sea running.

And I did what I knew I had to do and fished with it from the off. Another thing that really made my morning yesterday was hooking up with a lad I knew from my tournament casting days - wow could this bloke bang a lead a frigging mile! - and being able to help put him on a few fish. When we first got down to the mark I put Andy in a position where he could cast into a very specific area. He hooked a bass on his first cast! It wasn’t a big fish and it came off at his feet, but it made my morning like you would not believe and I was grinning away like a loon. I could have fished the exact spot myself but I would far rather give a friend the first chance of covering a very specific bit of water first - and it worked.

Anyway, the long and the short of it is that I caught a few bass on my new cheb weight based setup, including a fairly nice bass which came off as I went to grab my leader in the turbulence. I also got the most almighty thump on a 30g Surf Seeker in the surf later on which literally nearly pulled the rod out of my hands, but that’s a memory to wake me up on another morning at some point! On the subject of my cheb weight setup, I was quite surprised at how well the 15cm SSS was getting out there with the 14g cheb head, and then changing over to the smaller 13cm SSS as per the photo above - still with the 14g cheb head because it’s all I had with me yesterday - saw the lure fly out even better. I know that lighter cheb weights will cut the distance down, but it was very easy to swim the 14g cheb head setup in pretty shallow water with my rod tip up. And wow a few bass properly slammed it hard!

So that was the jolt of confidence I needed to go further down this particular rabbit hole. At one point I found a deeper rock pool and had a good play with the different setups - rigged conventionally on a belly-weight weedless hook above and also the cheb head setup - and it was so noticeable how different the lure actions are when rigged in these different ways. Not better or worse as I said earlier, just different, and wow do these SSSs roll when there isn’t a weight on the belly. One thing I hadn’t noticed before but bloody hell I do now is how incredible the SSS looks on the drop - that tail goes absolutely loopy when you obviously have a heavy enough head to make it properly drop/swim on the way down. One for the future and another early brain-bouncing morning. If you have got to here then thank you for reading and hopefully getting a better insight into why my brain so often wakes me up far too early in the morning…………..

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