Stealth for Coldwater Bass

“After working with the technique, I realized that the float must be made of Styrofoam. Plastic floats take on water too easily, and they won’t hold up to a day’s fishing.”

“Most floats are fine if you just need to hold a jig above bottom, but they don’t do anything else. Weighted floats increase casting distance, but they weren’t ideal for the float and fly.”

Coan knew he wanted a float that was weighted for added casting distance. He also wanted something that enhanced the system—a true strike indicator in addition to its role in suspending a lure. The result is “Bob’s Bobber.”

“Through trial and error, I found that the best float for the job was a weighted 1-inch model,” Coan says. “Weighted floats are designed to float top-side-up no matter what. Instead, I wanted a bobber that would lie on its side until the weight of the jig stood it up.”

That meant cutting open the float and repositioning the weight. After much experimentation, Coan found the perfect positioning and had a float that was slightly top-heavy—just enough so that it rests on its side until the jig falls to the end of the line beneath it. If the float doesn’t stand up, either the water’s not deep enough for the leader between the float and the jig, or a bass has eaten it!

Getting Deeper

Coan’s 1-inch weighted float gets 90 percent of the duty when he and Headrick fish the float and fly. With rods measuring between 8 and 10 feet in length, they can manage leaders up to 13 or 14 feet with a fixed float. But what do you do when bass suspend deeper than that? How do you fish the float and fly 16 or even 20 feet deep?

Until last year, you didn’t. That’s when Coan began experimenting with a slipbobber. Conventional slipbobbers wouldn’t work—when an angler began jiggling his rod tip to twitch the float and fly along, the jig would be lifted toward the surface and out of the strike zone. More modifications were needed.

“I realized I’d need a heavier jig to pull the line through the float, so I switched to a 1/8-ounce model,” Coan says. “Then I removed the plastic insert you find in most slipbobbers and inverted it. This way, the bobber stop won’t just rest against the insert; it catches in the collar of the insert. The final modification I made was to use dental floss instead of the usual threadlike bobber-stop material. Dental floss is finer, works its way through rod guides better, and catches the float better.”

The end product is a bobber that catches the bobber stop when the jig sinks so you can precisely set the depth. Once it settles, you can twitch your rod tip in the way that best works the bait to draw strikes. The bobber stop lodges in the collar of the float and won’t let go until you reel the float to the rod tip for the next cast or while fighting a fish. Since the float rests against the jig during the cast, extremely long rods are unnecessary. And long casts are easy with the aerodynamic rig.