Omnia's Five Essential Smallmouth Techniques

Video Transcription

What's up everybody, this is Polish Pete and these are Omnia Fishing's five essential smallmouth techniques to catch yourself, those giant summertime bronze backs, our favorite fish. So there's obviously a whole bunch of techniques to go target smallmouth bass, but these are the five that amongst all of us here who've pretty much traveled around most of the North country for smallmouth. Not a ton of experience in the South or smallmouth, I have a little bit myself, but we think these five techniques are going to be the essential ones for capturing those giant bronze backs.

We're going to start off first with probably the most old school of this whole bunch and that is the tube. So right here we got some Strike King Coffee Tubes and some X-Zone tubes here as well. The X-Zone one's coming some killer, killer colors. Strike King ones are some of the most popular and done a lot of damage around the Great Lakes part of the country because of that coffee scent. So if you're a scent person, you might want to look at these. If you're a visual, you have more faith in visual and colors and things like that, these X Zone tubes look absolutely beautiful and it's pretty simple. We have some VMC Dominator Tube Jigs right here. These are great tube jigs, just round bent hooks. You just shove it in the front of the tube and push the jig eye through the front of the tube and tie your line on and X-Zone has got some great information out there on some tube cracking techniques. You can just drag them. All my tube fishing success early came from casting it way out there, getting the boat in the wind and drifting it over rock flats and over points and humps and things of that nature. Just dragging the tube on the bottom. But there's also ways to impart action on them and get bit. But a tube is a no brainer essential technique for smallmouth fishing.

Next up would be the one that I think now has turned into the biggest confidence builder for a lot of people when it comes to small fishing and mainly because you can cover so much water and that is the swimmer technique. So you're looking at Keitech being the most popular one of all time when it comes to throwing a swimmer. There's lots of soft plastic swimbaits from all the manufacturers but these Keitech ones by far and away are our biggest seller when it comes to this style of bait and you got the Outkast Golden Eye swimmer heads. I mean these are designed by Josh Douglas and the Outkast boys. This jig head is a favorite of mine. Obviously one those guys are my buddies and two we do do a lot of fishing these swimmers by contacting the rocks in the bottom and covering water and just getting them to banging to the rocks and the lip on the front of those things great for contacting rock and coming through those rocks and not getting hung up all the time and they come with Gamakatsu hooks on them. Great bait keeper on these as well. They come in multiple different hook options so depending on the size swimmer you're going to be running. Obviously bigger running get into those 3, 4/0 hooks and 2/0, 3/0, 4/0 hooks and then you can get all the way down to the one odds when you get into like the little Spark Shads and really small you know different Keitech offerings and things like that.

Next up is the newest one on the block of all these techniques I'm talking about and that would be the ned rig. It's not new anymore but it's the newest one of these five techniques and that 's as simple as it can be. Next again we'll bring our friends back from Outkast here with the Perfect Ned Head you're getting a Gamakatsu hook again cool keeper on this the wire keeper that just works great with the ElaZtech offerings. You can't beat the TRD's they float like crazy stands straight up this colors Canada Craw which is a killer killer color for largemouth and smallmouth but you know the ned rig technique is a killer killer way to catch smallmouth no matter the time of the year. It works everywhere from pre-spawn to bed fishing through clean through that tough post-spawn period to when they're set up offshore in the summer they always bite a ned rig so that was a big argument here we wanted to leave it off I wanted to leave it off because I don't think it's that much fun but man it works so it got voted on by the team.

Next up is probably the number one technique you've seen dominate smallmouth tournaments from all over the country and that is the drop shot. You cannot beat a drop shot whether you're fishing from the equator to the north pole it doesn't matter drop shot works on everybody water and almost for every species as well but it was far as smallmouth comes I mean the brownback Flatworms these are the hardest color to get for a long time this has been the hot color in the Flatworms it's kind of quiet and kept under the radar for a while but we finally got a whole bunch of them every time we got them we'd sell them out as fast as we got them so the Flatworm I have the original Slammers here from uh X-Zone as well we saw Brandon Palaniuk win tournaments on the a lot of Canadian anglers and Great Lakes anglers have won a lot of money on these Slammers there's a finesse version as well they're real flat on the bottom they have incredible action on a drop shot these are meant to be nose hooked. If action's your thing and you want to like your forward facing sonar fishing and you're trying to get active fish or targeting certain fish and you're shaking that bait this is a great bait to look at.

If you're kind of just out there drifting aimlessly trying to get negative fish to bite that obviously swallow this max on pretty dang good you're gonna need some drop shot weights I've switched more to the teardrop style myself, the pencil style weights still work especially in super super heavy rock if you're drift fishing a long distance if you're letting the wind just blow the boat across a flat of rocks I prefer this pencil style it does come through the rocks a little nicer this teardrop is just to me way easier to keep vertical and I can feel bottom contact a lot better with a lighter weight with these. Everybody seemed to have gone to larger weights in this because why not have your bait down there in the in the at the bottom but after looking at some forward facing sonar I'm seeing the advantage now back to go in smaller weights too and letting that bait have a different fall rate and giving it different actions without so much heavy weight beneath the bait. So Woo! tungsten has the perfect offerings for you than that and we picked our most popular drop shot hook here for everybody is the Split Shot drop shot from Gamakatsu this is a number one here a perfect size or either of these baits when your nose hooking it there's a bunch of cool options in drop shot hooks but this is was most popular amongst the crew here.

Last technique I'm going to talk about is the soft plastic jerk bait and I know that's the one probably a lot of you thought made you got left out of here but I'm telling you right now I looked but we were all discussing this I thought about some of the biggest one I've ever caught and come on a soft plastic jerkbait now a regular jerkbait in the spring or in the fall months it's hard to beat a hard jerkbait I should say like a Megabass Vision 110 or Lucky Craft Pointer or a Rap or a Shadow Rap or even the new Berkley offerings and when it comes to jerkbaits uh are are absolutely devastating in those colder water months. I think when you get to the summer months the soft plastic jerkbait is a huge huge player you can work it really fast you can work it really slow you can let them sink a mile. White chartreuse's big bright colors and they just come up and crush these things you need yourself like a 4/0 offset hook if you're running a full-size soft plastic jerkbait like the Zoom Fluke uh which this thing comes in I think about five and a quarter inches uh so that 4/0 is a perfect size to get the hook a little bit more than halfway back there in the bait and you can hook them up no matter where they get the bait.

Got to point out some lines here you got Seaguar InvisX and 10 pound perfect for your tube fishing uh you could even fish a drop shot if you're in a really zebra muscle-y part of the part of the lake. I definitely think you want to run at least 10 when you're running a soft plastic jerk bait like that you got your seven pounds like this Shooter here for your finesse techniques like a Ned rig or uh or the drop shot of course maybe even 10 pound back for that swimmer as well but two perfect lines for smallmouth fishing all this terminal and all these baits will catch you fish anywhere in the country when it comes to smallmouth fishing so those were our five essential smallmouth techniques [Music]