When rigging soft plastics for shallowish water, what are your reasons for going with either a belly-weighted weedless/offset hook OR a weedless jig head?

I hope you don’t mind me asking the same question here as I did on my Facebook page yesterday, but I am very fortunate with the amount of engagement I get from a wide range of anglers (my eternal thanks). I never take this for granted and you have probably guessed by now that I am genuinely interested in how other anglers go about their fishing. I want to learn, I enjoy sharing this sort of information, and I quite simply love communicating about fishing. If more than a handful of you here were into black metal I’d communicate a lot more about that I might add, so count yourself lucky!

I think nothing of clipping on something like the Savage Gear Sandeel V2 and straight-retrieving it when I am bass fishing in slightly deeper water, but when it comes to shallow to shallowish water especially I tend to default to the weedless/offset hook approach when I am rigging various soft plastics. Whether I use a hook with a belly-weight or not depends on various factors, but for swimming paddletails around I can usually find little wrong with this approach. I tend to carry 4/0 and 6/0 weedless hooks with me, some with lighter and heavier belly-weights, some without.

Then if I want to bump stuff along the bottom I might turn to a (ready to fish) paddletail on a jig head such as the Savage Gear Sandeel V2 Weedless or the irrefutably deadly Fiiish Black Minnow. I don’t have a lifetime of experience with jig heads on their own as such, but I do like some of these ready to fish soft plastics which revolve around a jig head and lure body AND which take away the whole confusion element. No need to try and figure out which lure might sit best on which jig head and so on, indeed I still have various, random jig heads that I have never even used but which I bought over the years because they looked nice!

I recently got a couple of packets of the Westin Swimming Jig Heads for messing around with different creature bait presentations. As irresistable as say a floating Z-Man Turbo CrawZ 4’’ rigged on one of these jig heads looks when you bump it along the bottom (as per the photo above), the name of the jig head of course implies that they also work pretty well when “swimming” various soft plastics. Something which I don’t think I do enough of because my default so often tends to be the weedless hook approach. My biggest bass so far came on the original white Gravity Stick Paddletail rigged on the 6/0 belly-weight hook we made for these lures, so I know it works just fine - but I like options with the range of ground and conditions I find myself fishing for these amazing fish.

One specific jig head which I have heard a good bit about over the years but never actually used myself is the (weedless) Decoy Violence VJ-36. I have a massive photo library and I have always been very deliberate about keywording my images so I can easily find what I need for various uses. I did a search of my library and found out that I actually took some photos of a French angler rigging a soft plastic on a Decoy Violence VJ-36 jig head back in 2009, photo above. Some things don’t stick though and for some reason this specific jig head and what a lot of anglers obviously do with it didn’t quite mesh for me at the time.

Do you find yourself sometimes coming back around to stuff though as you gain more experience and hopefully knowledge? As per my blog post the other day, my wanting to effectively scale down for certain bass fishing scenarios is forcing me to look at different options. I do what I do and that’s to ask around - mates, my Facebook page etc. - and it became very obvious very quickly that this particular Decoy Violence VJ-36 jig head sits well with a lot of the smaller soft plastics. So I have obviously bought some to have a bit of a play with, and what I didn’t realise was that the hooks on these things are on the larger side of what you’d expect. The 4/0 is a big 4/0 and it sits well on a paddletail which happens to work really well when you put the extra weight on the front - the Savage Gear Slender Scoop Shad (in the 15cms size for this 4/0) - and the “little” 2/0 version seems to sit well with some of the smaller paddletails I want to mess around with. Perfect.

And I am going to have to dig out some MegaBass Spindle Worms which I know I have here somewhere. Enough anglers have said to me how well they do with this specific paddletail rigged on the Decoy Violence VJ-36 that I can’t ignore them. I also wonder how this jig head might work with my go-to Gravity Stick Paddletails? What does a good weedless jig head with a range of different head weights offer me compared to the weedless hook approach? You all have a good weekend, these bloody howling east winds are giving me far too much time to think about this kind of stuff! It doesn’t get any easier……………

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