The importance of quiet and accurate casts to shallow cover should never be overlooked when you’re pitching and flipping. As years have passed, I’ve learned that choosing particular shapes and sizes of soft plastic baits and trailers can have a tremendous impact on your ability to make stealthy presentations.
I’ve been testing the Hoax Fish Bamboozie Craw for the last few months and have found it to be a great choice whether you’re using it as a jig trailer or a Texas-rigged pitching bait.
What you’ll like about it
The Bamboozie Craw has a very thin body which has allowed me to make difficult casts into thick cover with the utmost of ease. It’s tough to skip a heavy bait with a bunch of appendages and it seems as if the designers of this bait took notice. With very little effort, you can skip the Bamboozie Craw underneath docks, overhangs and laydowns with incredible accuracy.
You’ll also be impressed by your hookup ratio when using this particular bait on a Texas rig. There’s hardly any plastic between the hook point and the fish’s mouth, so you’re likely to capitalize on the large majority of your bites whether you’re making short pitches or longer casts to deep brush piles.
The thick head of the Bamboozie Craw does an excellent job at keeping the bait in place on the back of your favorite jigs. I’ve been primarily using this bait as a jig trailer this month and it stays put for dozens of skips and pitches without sliding down the shank of the hook. The head-section of the bait is a bit long for my liking, so I’ve been trimming about 1/2-inch off of it before threading it on my jigs.
The action of this bait is quite intriguing. It doesn’t have an overly aggressive action but it’s not “too” subtle, either. I’m not a huge fan of big, attention-grabbing trailers, so I really like the moderate action of the Bamboozie Craw. It looks very realistic in the water when used as a bottom-contact bait, but can also work well on a swim jig or vibrating jig.
My experiences with it
My home lake is chock-full of docks, so as you can probably guess—I’m a pretty hardcore jig fisherman and this fishery has been an excellent test course, if you will, for the Bamboozie Craw. As I mentioned earlier, I’ve been using it for several months and caught lots of nice fish on it.
This is certainly one of the better jig trailers I’ve tested recently. It holds up well, it doesn’t get all jacked up when you’re skipping it under docks and most importantly, the fish have responded very well to it. Perhaps my favorite characteristic of this bait is its castability. If you’re trying to get better at skipping docks, I highly suggest you try this bait.
It’s also worth mentioning that this bait makes an excellent chunk-style trailer as well and should produce very well throughout the colder months. It dramatically slows the fall of your rubber jigs and provides that very subtle, lackadaisical action that winter bass crave.
The Bamboozie Craw has also proven to be quite effective on traditional Texas rigs and punch rigs. You’ll have to tinker with your hook point placement every now and again, but that certainly hasn’t been a deal breaker for me.
Final impressions
There’s not much flash to the Hoax Fish Bamboozie Craw, but there doesn’t need to be. It’s an intelligently designed soft plastic that catches a lot of bass. The colors are practical, the bait is durable and it skips like a pebble. I think it’s worth a very close look the next time you’re stocking up on soft plastics.
The Hoax Fish Bamboozie Craw is available here.
