If you haven’t noticed I’ve mentioned the drop shot in several articles recently and there’s a good reason for that…it’s hot outside. I’m in the southern US so it’s really hot down here, but a lot of the anglers that I follow in other parts of the country are saying the same thing. It rained a lot here too and so the water is pretty stained. Throw in a really clear day with bright blue skies and that’s usually a recipe for not catching a lot of fish. Having said that, I still try to go fishing at least one or two times a week and even if the conditions aren’t great you can still give yourself a decent chance at catching a fish if you bring the right lure. And in many cases, the right lure is going to be a finesse presentation that you can use to target fish near the bottom of the water column. That usually ends up being a drop shot for me since I’ve caught so many fish with one and know it will usually get the job done.
Now if you start getting into throwing a drop shot you will quickly discover that there’s all sorts of hooks that people suggest. To keep things simple I’m going to put them into two general categories:
- Exposed hooks
- Weedless hooks
Exposed hooks can be extremely effective if you are on a larger body of water and targeting fish that are around rocks where there isn’t a lot of grass or cover. That’s almost never the case for me, so I pretty much throw a drop shot with a weedless hook, but I did want to mention the other style of hook since there’s definitely a time and a place for it. But since I’m almost always going to be targeting fish that are around some sort of cover and since it doesn’t seem like I’ve lost too many fish after getting a bite, I usually like to keep things simple and just keep some weedless hooks in my tackle box. I’ve also tried several different weedless drop shot hooks, and my favorite hook so far has been the 2/0 Gamakatsu G-Finesse Hybrid Worm Hook. This thing is light enough that you can still get away with using one on a drop shot, but heavy enough that it will still hold up under most conditions. That’s not to say that it’s impossible to bend one out, and if you happen to get a bigger fish then it’s possible but in my case I’ve had that happen once and it the hook still held the fish (but I did end up swapping it out after I let it go).
The Gamakatsu G-Finesse Hybrid Worm Hook was designed to be a cross between a standard ewg hook and a worm hook, so the idea is you still get most of the benefits of the wider gap hook, but with the added benefits that you would get with a traditional offset worm hook. It’s also not what I would consider to be a new hook at this point as it’s been on the market for several years…but if you’ve been reading my blog for a bit then you might already know that a lot of the lures and tackle that I go with has been around for a while. For the most part I use 4 different lures with this setup:
Two of these are for targeting bass that are feeding on shad and the other two are for targeting bass that are in smaller ponds where there probably isn’t going to be any shad. For the bass that are in ponds my primary lure of choice is going to be a standard 6″ Roboworm. This thing has proven itself time and time again and if you are thinking about fishing a drop shot in a pond and not sure about what lure to use my suggestion is to go with this one. On the other hand there are times when they might not seem interested in a worm. That’s not very often but if that’s the case then that’s when I like to go with a KVD Dream Shot. This lure is a little smaller and it looks a little more like a small bait fish. They also have colors that are very similar to the Roboworm and the green and purple ones are what I usually use.
On the other hand if I’m somewhere where the bass are chasing shad then there are a couple of different lures that I like to use. The first is a 6″ Yamamoto Sensei and I like this one because it looks absolutely great on a drop shot. It also comes in some amazing colors and is a little bit larger than the Roboworm so it has just a little bit more drawing power. The other lure that I like in this situation is a 4″ NetBait BaitFuel Twitch. This thing is an amazing value and also comes in some awesome shad colors.
One of the things I like the most about this setup is the versatility. As you can see all four of these lures fit well on this hook, which means I don’t have to tie on a whole new setup if I want to swap over to a different lure. That’s especially useful when tying on a drop shot as it already takes a little longer to rig one since there are a couple of extra steps involved. If you haven’t already tried this hook out I highly recommend it. I’m not sponsored by Gamakatsu (or any other fishing tackle company as of the date this was written) but when it comes to drop shot hooks, this one has become my favorite one to use.
