Sometimes a touch hasty to add weight to paddletails? Could the “naked” approach help with a specific situation?

I am going to hazard a guess here that most of you kind people who are about to read through this blog post know about and most likely fish with soft plastic paddletails or shads as they are also known. I am also going to guess that most of you - me included - will generally default to adding some kind of additional weight to your paddletail. Granted that it might well be a Ready To Fish (RTF) paddletail like the Fiiish Black Minnow or the Savage Gear Savage Minnow when some kind of weighted jig head needs to be used for the lure to work……………

But there is of course this massive family of what most of us simply call paddletails which aren’t RTF out of the packet. You buy a packet of paddletails and you then buy the necessary components to rig them for your fishing (and yes, I agree, it’s not always the easiest thing in the world to know which hook or jig head sizes work best with which size paddletails etc.). For me it’s most often going to be those fantastic 6/0 or 4/0 weedless corkscrew hooks we did for the two sizes of Gravity Sticks - the hooks don’t only work with Gravity Sticks! - but of course there are any number of good weedless hooks out there these days. With or without belly-weights I might add. There are also a lot of really good jigheads that can work well with various paddletails, and increasingly I find myself almost defaulting to the excellent and easy to find Decoy Violence VJ-36 (weedless) jig heads, or the equally good but less easy to find BKK Silent Chaser EWG (weedless) Round Head jig heads.

The Gravity Stick Paddletail rigged “naked” on the 6/0 weedless corkscrew hook

What I don’t do enough of though is to fish certain paddletails “naked”, as in no extra weight added. Not all paddletails are going to swim quite right if you don’t add some kind of weight to the belly or head areas, and I can’t pretend that when we were bringing the Gravity Sticks to market that swimming the Paddletail specifically with no added weight was top of my wish list. It was more by luck than by judgement that I eventually found out that the Gravity Stick Paddletail does in fact swim really well with no added weight if the conditions aren’t too hectic and you need to get it particularly shallow. Damn these lures look good in the water when fished like this!

I seriously like the Slender Scoop Shads rigged on a Decoy Violence VJ-36 jig head

From the off I was pushing for a denser (added salt) material for the lure bodies to aid with casting distance, and that “denseness” really helps if you don’t want to add any extra weight. Same with the OSP DoLive Stick, a twitch-stick I will always try and fish naked because I think it works best like this. Then I take the second paddletail I trust above all others these days, the Slender Scoop Shad - which doesn’t swim at all well with no added weight. It’s no fault of the lure because it wasn’t designed to be fished like this.

The 4.5’’ OSP DoLive Shad rigged “naked”

The slightly more buoyant material and the deeper body shape doesn’t much like the naked approach. I would imagine something quite dense like the lethal Sawamura One Up Shads would also swim well with no added weight, but I wonder how the slightly more buoyant and also particularly lethal MegaBass Spindle Worm paddletails would respond to no added weight? The dense and very long-casting OSP DoLive Shad is another paddletail which happens to swim well naked.

Anyway, I had a situation the other day when I tried a very different state of the tide at an estuary mark I have been fishing a bit. I wanted to see what might happen - which was a lot of fish moving around. Most of them I grant you were mullet, but there are usually some bass mixed in with them. A few times there were some big, aggressive swirls/splashes in amongst those small gaps in the bladderwrack. I can’t prove it because I didn’t see the fish, but I am pretty sure at least a couple of times it was a decent bass killing something in those narrow pockets of water, right in tight to the shore line. I was dialled in on the crab imitation stuff and I simply could not present these lures in those bladderwrack gaps at all.

So I did what I often do and asked the question on my Facebook page, along the lines of “how would you approach a bass fishing situation like this?”. I got some really interesting and useful feedback - my thanks as always to so many kind people who choose to engage with me - and a few anglers suggested rigging a paddletail “naked” and literally dragging it across the tops of the bladderwrack and then letting it drop when it gets into one of those gaps or holes in the weed. Either you get hit in the gap or apparently the bass will sometimes smash the paddletail literally through the bladderwrack as you drag the lure across the top. If that ever happened to me I think I’d almost pass out with excitement, but one thing I know I need to be doing more of is fishing paddletails “naked” on both the open coast when the location or conditions suggest it, or on those quiet estuary marks when the bass can be working so close to the shoreline. You all have a good weekend, be still my bouncing brain!

Perfect ground and conditions for fishing a “naked” paddletail

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