Nose hooking your soft jerkbaits can add a whole new arsenal of fish catching presentations to your bag of tricks. It is a versatile rig that allows for some very innovative and subtle presentations. If you are a catch and release angler, the nose hook rig can also help you return more fish to the water unharmed . Lets find out how!
Hooks
Circle hooks are my first choice for nose hooking a bait. Manufacturers of circle hooks often have their own “terminology” for this style of hook. For example Gamakatsu calls their version of a circle hook the “Octopus” hook. Regardless of what you call it, the unique design of a circle hook has several important advantages over a typical bait hook.
- The basic design of the hook lends itself well to nose hooking. The curve of the hook helps keep the bait in place. This reduces the chance that the bait will come off the hook during a cast or when a fish strikes.
- Using circle hooks can makes setting the hook easy. When using a circle hook all you need to do is lift the rod in a sweeping motion as you reel. No “cross the fishes eyes” hook sets needed! I know you are probably skeptical. It can’t be that easy. Right. Well, I was skeptical too until I tried these hooks. Now I’m definitely a believer!
- Gut hooking a fish is extremely unlikely. Once again I’m sure your a little skeptical. Once again, so was I until I took these great little hooks for a test drive one evening many years ago. I would estimate that over 90% of the fish I’ve caught with circle hooks have been hooked in the corner of the mouth. As a result these hooks save time, money, and fish! Instead of spending my valuable fishing time doing river side surgery to dislodge a hook or cutting and retying hooks, I’m quickly unhooking fish and casting to the next “honey hole”.
- Nose hooking a bait allows you to fish with an exposed hook which results in a better hook up percentage. Basically, the hook does not need to penetrate plastic on the hook set. This is the primary advantage of the rigging technique. Rigging the bait is a fairly simple procedure. The image below illustrates the finished rig.
 |
| nose hooked soft jerkbaits and circle hooks. |
| Recommended Hook Sizes | |
| Bait size | Hook size |
| 2″-3″ | #4 |
| 4″-5″ | #2 |
| 6″-7″ | 1/0 |
Please remember these are just general recommendations for hook size. The style and bulk of the soft jerkbait may require some adjustments to hook sizes.
Weighting the Bait
Typically a nose hook rigged soft jerkbait is fished without weight. When you need to go deeper than about 3 feet with this rig you will probably need to add some weight. One way to add weight and preserve the action of the bait is to use “nail” style weights. These are weights that can be inserted into the bait at various positions to evenly distribute the weight thus controlling the fall and action of the bait.
Fishing the Bait
Fishing the bait is beyond the intended scope of this article. In subsequent articles I will cover several techniques for fishing the soft jerkbait. Stay tuned!
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