Weedless & Weightless

It's the quiet and subtle approach for catching bass from snaggy ground.

- Henry Gllbey

First light rears its head over the most perfect, shallow, rocky, weed-strewn ground you can imagine for bass fishing. The water is calm and clear, and the hunch you can’t ignore is that this is exactly the right situation for fishing with soft plastics rigged weedless and weightless – the quiet, subtle approach, to go with location and conditions.

You clip on your lure, launch it out there, and then start to deftly fish it back with a simple ‘twitch, twitch, pause, reel a bit’ sort of retrieve. A few casts later there is a hard tap on your rod tip. Twitch the weedless/ weightless rigged soft plastic once more and then everything goes tight and your rod tip slams around. Bass on!

Hang on a minute – what are you on about? How do you cast a weightless lure in the first place, and what do you really mean by the word weedless? Surely a weightless lure isn’t going to cast very well, and surely it’s impossible for any lure not to pick up bits of weed suspended in the water?

Here, we are going to get to the bottom of this weedless and weightless thing, and I am going to tell you, firstly, what these words actually mean in a lure fishing context, and secondly, how lethal it can sometimes be bass fishing like this.

DEFINITIONS

The definition of weightless may be obvious to some, but I have been contacted numerous times by anglers asking how to cast a weightless soft plastic lure.