With the rise of forward-facing sonar, all sorts of jig and minnow combinations, from Damiki Rigs to hover heads, have become necessary tools. Soft plastics work well for bass – until they don’t. That’s when Clark Reehm goes for the hard stuff.
“Sometimes I need to look for a better mousetrap,” the veteran pro and Sam Rayburn guide told Wired2Fish. “Whether it’s something more efficient, or I’m seeing them on the graph and they don’t want to bite. There are two reasons that fish hit a lure – it’s either to eat or as a reaction and when I don’t want to eat, just like when they’re on the bed, I need to find something that’ll trigger them.”
That’s when he turns to heavy metal – not just the traditional jigging spoon, but also lures that are typically thought of as situational, like an ice jig or a tailspinner.
What We’ve Learned from Forward-Facing Sonar
Reehm is typically an early adopter of new technology, and has relied on his Lowrance ActiveTarget system not just to locate fish, but to better understand how they behave across the board.
“How many fish are looking at your bait and not reacting?” he asked rhetorically. “One of the biggest things I’ve learned is the importance of a fresh drop. I tell my guide clients to drop the bait, pop it five or six times, and then real it up. If they get too good of a look at it, that’s when they inspect it, kiss it and back off.”
When anglers want to make a quick drop, often they’ll use a spoon, and Reehm does too, but he said that in many cases an ice jig is a better choice.
“It’s nose-weighted, so it gets down faster than a spoon, which flutters. Looking at the ice jig, people think it glides and spirals, with those little wings picking up water, but the real action happens when you snap it.
“That’s when it jumps. It might jump 4 to 6 feet out to the side, then come back to center, then to a different part of the circle. That’s why it works so well, whether in a hole in the ice or just dropping straight down – it allows you to cover water aggressively. Lots of fish bite on the first drop, but it also allows you to effectively search an area,” explains Reehm.
The ice jig has increasingly become his slumpbuster in recent years. In addition to generating bites from black bass, just about everything in the water eats it — so he can find fish on his graph and quickly determine if they’re crappie, white bass, stripers, or some other species that aren’t his primary target. It excels when he’s dropping straight on them, but when he wants to cover an even wider range he’ll switch to a tailspinner or a jigging spoon.
In both cases he’s typically using a 3/4- or 1-ounce model, so he can bomb cast it and then attract fish from a long distance away.
“With the tailspinner, you create a ‘controlled U’ that allows you to cover not only a long distance, but also a lot of the water column,” he explained. “The jigging spoon does the same thing. You pump it back to the boat and it acts erratically and triggers strikes.”
With all three lures, he keeps his color choices simple: anything that replicates a shad, but he noted that he rarely uses them in water with more than two and a half feet of visibility, so clear water efforts might require some dialing it in.
“Often I’ll be fishing with two guide clients and we’ll all be throwing different colors,” he said. “Typically the fish are not picky. If I know we’re around fish and we make two or three casts and don’t get a bite, I’m more likely to leave than I am to change colors.”
Clark Rheem’s Tackle and Tactics
All of these heavy metal lures are heavy, aerodynamic and fairly hydrodynamic. Even the Rapala Jigging Raps he uses are typically at least 7/8-ounce, so he can keep his tackle fairly heavy.
That starts with a Dobyns Champion Series 704 baitcasting rod. It provides enough tip to create action on the snap, but also enough stiffness to keep the line tight during the fight. He’s tried the 703, and says it works, but with the 1-ounce lures he likes the additional power of the heavier stick.
“A bass is almost always going to go airborne or wallow on the surface when you catch him on these lures, and particularly with the ice jig you don’t know which hook he’s got,” he said. “You need a stout rod so you can use torque on that fish. Never give him slack.”
For that same reason, he utilizes a 7:1 reel spooled with straight 15-pound-test Seaguar InvizX fluorocarbon line.
The proper gear allows him to maximize effectiveness by keeping the lure in the strike zone. He said that most of his guide clients initially fish the lure too fast or too slow.
“If you’re barely moving it and not covering water, you’re not using these lures effectively,” he said.
Also, anglers think of these situationally. He’ll pull out the ice jig in 90-degree temperatures in the middle of summer, when there is clearly no iced-up water in Texas. It excels on suspended fish year round and even if they’re close to the bottom, they’ll be “feeding up,” so, the fleeing motion of the lure forces their predatory instincts.
One other misconception is that these lures can’t be fished around cover. While Reehm does tend to utilize them most on fairly cover-free high spots, and they’re a no-go in thick vegetation, it’s a fact of life that they’ll occasionally get hung up on trees, stumps, and brush.
“The key is to recognize that you’re hung up and avoid setting the hook,” he said. “That just jams it in further. You can almost always use the weight of the bait to knock it loose, and just in case I keep a homemade plug knocker made out of a 4-ounce catfish weight in the boat.”
He also noted that while these three lures are exceptional producers for him, he’s had less success in similar situations with blade baits. He suspects that it’s because it doesn’t get as cold in Texas as it does where those lures are key players.
“But any time bass are feeding on shad, I’ll have one or all of these lures ready to go. I have them tied on down here every month but February, March, and early April.”
