VMC Crossover Rings: Which Size is Right For You?

Video Transcription

What's up everybody? It's been a while since we visited the topic of the VMC crossover pliers. And the reason why we bring it up is our CSRs have pointed out that a lot of people are still messaging in and having questions about what size crossover rings for what style of worms. 

If you go to our page for the VMC crossover rings, we actually have a listing of all the recommended size rings for some very popular base kind of give you a frame of reference. For example, the six inch Senko with an eight millimeter ring. The very popular five inch Senko with a seven millimeter ring trick worms with a five millimeter ring. Um, you can get down all the way to a three millimeter ring, which would be perfect for like really tiny finesse drop shot worms, really tiny, tiny finesse, drop shot minnow things of that nature. And if you're not familiar with the crossover pliers or the rings, these things have become a staple in my boat. In fact, I have three now just kind of floating around on the floor and different compartments and stuff there. They save you a lot of money, you're not burning through worms. It gives you the ability to wacky rig and neko rig a worm without actually penetrating the worm with the hook itself.

So I'll give you an example the crossover pliers themselves actually come with some crossover rings. You're gonna want to buy some extra packs or different size worms and things of that nature, but right inside the handles here are little compartments. So you can open up and that this one here is empty, you just put whatever size rings you want in there over here. Got some rings in this compartment here where you can see that it holds them in there for you. So you're not actually hunting down little bags of rings for yourself.

I've been typically using this for wacky rigging and one style worm for neko rig, which would be similar to size to a trick worm, which I'm running one size down and they're recommended. I've been running like the four inch on a wacky rig. I've been, I've started off the recommended seven mil but I tend to skip docks a lot with a wacky rig. And I noticed bluegills, I could pull the ring up the worm a little bit. It does damage your worm a little bit more if you hook a bunch of fish but it does make it so you can get more aggressive with your cast and the bluegills can't pull the ring down on you.

So, experiment with it a little bit yourself. These things aren't that expensive to try the different sized rings trying out the different ones. But I'll give you an example here with the eight mil and a six inch Senko. The nose of the ring is our of the pliers tapered. I like to run the thin end of like a Senko or any sort of worm up through towards the nose there and I just grab the end of the ring and pull the pliers off. Um you know, kind of Yamamoto for example, gives you kind of a frame of reference of where to put it with the egg sacs. So it looks like it's longer on one side sometimes, but it's actually not.

The great thing about these rings is everybody knows if you don't know, there is a drilled section on a little nub of this ring here that can go, hence crossover either direction. So I can actually hook it vertically like this, put a nail weight in it and fish it neko style or I can hook it right down the middle and fish it wacky style. These things like I said, are they stand alone as far as the versatility of them and how much they can save you and save you time and the water more to me than even saving the money, which is more important to a lot of us now than ever. It's been just the efficiency of these. I throw this on this six inch worm here.

Typically if I'm throwing a six inch senko or anything big like this, I'm fishing offshore, not as much shallow. I know that's different for some people in different parts of the country, but I'm actually gonna throw this a long ways and I can really be aggressive, my cast and snap on them and throw them for far and I'm not burning through worms all day long. So once again, frame of reference is on the crossover page site to give you kind of a laid out description of different sized rings for different sized worms, but you know, for the most popular ones, like a trick worm. Once again, they recommend running a five mil, five inch Senko, the seven mil for the eight or six inch Senko, the eight millimeter. Get really, really small with some of them for your finesse style worm.

So that's what we got on crossover pliers. If you haven't tried them, check these things out, they're gonna save you money and time on the water.