Nuts, Bolts, and More for Smallies

Lost fish are often the result of slack, which may have been part of my problem in the first place. Tackle choices must compensate for this. I’ve held my boat in place in rough water for years and caught loads of bass, but something unexplained seems to have changed. Why do so many of these fish now seem to come unhooked?

Clapper’s Magic

Steve Clapper is the most reknowned bass fisherman on Lake Erie and perhaps across the entire Great Lakes region. Throughout his 30-year career fishing the Great Lakes, he’s won hundreds of bass tournaments, most recently the 2007 Chevy Open in Detroit, where he pocketed $200,000. And nearly all of those wins have come using a tube on a leadhead jig, with this year’s win no exception. Perhaps no one has a better understanding of the intricacies of deep-structure fishing for huge smallmouths, particularly in rough water conditions so common on the Great Lakes. Clapper recently explained his theory of tube-jig fishing for big smallies.

“In that FLW victory last year, I relied more on a tube, though I caught some bass on a drop-shot rig,” he reports. “When it got real rough, with seas at or above 7 feet, it was easier to keep baits on the bottom with a big, heavy tube-jig.” Clapper often used a 3/4-ounce head during that event, yet surprisingly, few of the bass he hooked jumped and threw the lure.

“The key to my deep-structure fishing has always been using stout rods and stout hooks,” he adds. “I used a custom-made rod designed specifically for deep structure.” The rod, built on a G. Loomis SJ842 blank, tapes 71⁄2 feet long with the handle and has a medium-heavy action. Clapper often uses a heavy-gauge hook in his custom-made tube heads, and driving that hook into a big smallmouth’s jaw in 30 feet of water, not to mention while fishing in 7-foot waves, can be more than a bit challenging, requiring heavy gear.

“For line, fluorocarbon is a must,” he says. “But you need to be careful with thin fluorocarbon and a powerful rod, to prevent break-offs on the hook-set. I’m fishing a lot now with Berkley’s new Trilene 100% Fluorocarbon, due to its incredible strength.

“On my jigs, I use a 3/0 Gamakatsu heavy-gauge round-bend hook. Although it’s rated a heavy-gauge wire, it’s considerably smaller in size and diameter than a 4/0. It doesn’t flex, and it doesn’t tear much of a hole in the fish’s jaw tissues. That helps keep ’em hooked. The 3/4-ounce Bite-Me Big Dude head also has a 3/0, and that’s what I turn to for fishing really rough water.”

Clapper’s comments got me thinking. Most of my career, I’ve used 4/0 heavy-gauge hooks in jigheads along with a discontinued heavy-action Team Daiwa spinning rod I nicknamed “The Cannon.” I could always get the hook into a bass but often lost fish when they jumped. I’m a firm believer in the need for stout gear when fishing deep structure, but maybe that fine line between a 3/0 and 4/0 hook, and more specifically the wire gauge of those hooks, can affect the likelihood of losing fish.