Bass Fishing Tip of the Week 11/07/09: My Favorite Worm Hook

Worm or soft plastic hooks for bass fishing come in all sorts of varieties and styles but my favorite and most consistent hook is the extra wide gap style. I personally prefer Gamakatsu hooks as they are extremely sharp and remain that way even after catching some fish.

The reason I like the EWG style is that I hook the worms/soft plastics by going completely through it with the hook point then I pull up on the bait and allowing a small portion of the plastic to cover it. What the advantage of this way of hooking the bait is that a majority of the force applied during a hookset is used to sink the hook into the fishes mouth versus using that force to penetrate the plastic then into the fish. The EWG will allow the rigging of the bait as I described without clogging the throat of the hook with the plastic.

When purchasing this style of hook one of the keys to selecting them is the wire gauge. If you are flippin or pitching you need to use the heavier wire gauge hooks. If you are making long casts on a Carolina Rig then the thinner gauge wire will make it easier to penetrate the fishes mouth.

Try the EWG on your next trip and rig the plastic worm as I described and I think you will be pleasantly surprised in your hook rate percentage improvement.

Read all of the Bass Fishing Tips here at Floridabassfishing.us and use them and I'm pretty confident that you'll be doing more catching with less fishing :)

The Largemouth Herald