rip bait

When the stripers start heating up this spring, will you be ready for them? Here’s some where, what and how-to info to get you all dialed in!

Finding Stripers

The first trick to being successful is obviously finding the fish. Luckily, bay, Delta and river bass all seek out very similar types of water. While they are known for being heavily armored, apex killing machines, stripers are actually very skittish and spooky. To that end, they prefer deep water for hiding. Unfortunately for them, however, most of their food lives up in the shallows.

Flats

So, shallow flats are key ares to begin your search for stripers…especially ones that have easy access to deep water. As you can see in the diagram below (which is an excerpt from my eBook Light Tackle Delta Striper Secrets) the fish will often hang off the channel edges and then make quick raids into the shallows for food…

To target stripers in the shallows, I go about it a few different ways. If I’m fishing a low light period…dawn, dusk or on a cloudy or foggy day, I’ll work topwater baits over the flats. I’ve caught fish on surface lures in water as deep as 12 feet but I think 2-8 feet is a better range.

This fat bass smacked a good ol’ Pencil Popper for me on a cloudy day.

There’s a wide array of plugs that will work…I like the 5-inch Cotton Cordell Pencil Poppers in Bone and Chrome/Black and the Luckycraft Gunfish 135 in the Chartreuse Shad pattern. In wooden baits, I love the Katch Fishing Pencil Popper and the 5″ Striper Squirrel from AJ Lures.

When working these baits, vary your cadence until the fish show you what they want. Usually, you’ll see a big push of water behind the bait and then maybe a splash. Most of the time, the fish miss the lure a few times before they actually get it in their mouth, so its important to wait until you actually feel the fish before you set the hook!

Follow-Up Baits

Sometimes, stripers will follow your topwater bait all the way in but won’t commit to it. When that happens, try tossing a follow-up bait right back into where the fish just was. These can be just about any minnow-shaped bait that sinks, but I think the best ones are jerk baits like the MegaBass Kantata in Western Clown or a soft bait like the Zoom Super Fluke (pearl/chartreuse tail). Throw one of these guys in and give it a couple twitches and hang on…a lot of times the fish is still there and ready to eat!

Glide Baits

The Original Trout Glider

Glide baits have really taken off in recent years and are excellent choices when the fish don’t want to hit topwater. They can be fished several ways — all with the reel not the rod: You can slowly crank them in and they will have an “S” type of action. To change things up, do a couple quick cranks followed by a pause and the bait will speed up and then glide off to one side. You can even make gliders turn completely around once you get the hang of it.

As a basic rule of thumb, go slower when the water is colder and pick up the speed as temperatures increase. Mess around with your retrieve…the fish will tell you want they want (or don’t want) on a given day.

You can find a zillion of these guys on the market. I have had good success with the River2Sea S-Wavers in Bone or Light Trout colors; the Original TroutGlider (pictured above) and the Savage Gear Glide Swimmer in Bone.

You can find gliders for $100 and up, but I don’t think stripers can tell the difference…plus I’d never have the courage to throw one anywhere a fish might actually live!

Living on the Edge

Nice swimsuit striper that hit in 10 feet of water, just off the channel edge

As the sun gets brighter or the clouds burn off, the fish will often abandon the flats and head back out to the transition zones. They don’t usually move too far from their preferred feeding areas but will head for a little deeper water, where they feel safer.

Now, referring back to the above diagram, you can see a school of stripers in the bottom right. Those are fish that bailed out of the shallow water and are now patrolling the channel edges and breaks. These guys won’t be as susceptible to topwater and glide baits…Instead, try a lure that can get down better like a swimbait. Try a 1/4- to 3/4-ounce lead head jig and a 4″-5″ paddle tail swimbait body in white or white/chartreuse patterns.

Cast out towards the shallows and slowly work the bait just off the bottom, following the contour of the bottom as it starts to deepen up. When you get bit, keep cranking until the rod loads up. Set prematurely, and the fish will bolt.

Other lures for the edge zone include lipless cranks like the good ol’ 1/2- to 3/4-oz Rat-L-Trap or the Lunkerhunt Fillet Lipless Crankbait. Rip baits like the Megabass Kanata are also great choices here.

Now, just to help you visualize this flats near deepwater concept, here’s a bird’s eye view of a nice weedy flat with deep channels on both sides: A prime spot for bass!

More Striper Hot Spots and Techniques

To get to really dialed in on more places to catch stripers and what to use, check out my ebook, Light Tackle Delta Striper Secrets. It’s under $3 on Amazon and iBooks — or you can download the PDF version.

Help support this website: When you purchase a product through one of the links you find on this site, I get a very small commission – there’s no extra cost to you. I only highlight products that I have used and believe in. By using these affiliate links you can help me keep this website up and running. For more info, check out our Affiliate Disclosure page here.

Jerk Bait Brown To catch a big trout the next time you go stream fishing, ditch all the usual stuff — salmon eggs, small spinners and worms — and give the fish something meatier: Jerk Baits!

While aquatic invertebrates account for the bulk of the average stream trout’s diet, the largest fish in the creek prefer to dine on smaller fish. Jerk baits imitate forage fish extremely well and by using them you will see the average size of your catch go way up.

Jerk Baits

Jerk Bait is a term that refers to a wide array of minnow shaped plugs that are designed to be retrieved with a JERK-JERK-JERK-PAUSE type of retrieve. In my early days of throwing minnow baits for trout, we had a few basic ones from which to choose — chief among them were Rapalas and Rebels. Thanks to the explosion in the popularity of this technique among bass anglers, there are now more plastic baits than you could hope to try in ten trout seasons. In the warm-water world they’re often called “rip baits” and are pretty slick tools designed to solicit reaction strikes from bass. It just so happens that big trout love ‘em too!

Lucky Craft Pointer The old balsa and plastic baits I used as a kid were basically cast out and crank-in types of lures. The modern ripbait’s function is to be tossed out and retrieved with an aggressive popping (ripping) of the rod trip and cranking of the reel, punctuated with frequent pauses.

These new baits feature all kinds of fancy technology like tungsten rattles and weight transfer systems for bomb-like casting (remember the way a light wood plug would pinwheel when you’d throw it?), but the most important feature is their neutral buoyancy.

How far down these lures dive is governed by the size of the bill, but once you’ve cranked it down to its working depth and pause it, a jerk bait will hold its place in the water column. There’s no sinking or rising up like the baits of yesteryear and that’s one of the things that make these things so deadly.

The new generation of minnow baits is designed to be fished fast (though they also work well in cold water on a painfully slow retrieve), which allows you to quickly cover lots of water. Additionally, they’re adorned with some extremely sexy laser finishes and super realistic paint jobs. When you look at all the attractive attributes of rip baits, it’s easy to see why bass of all persuasions love ‘em – and it doesn’t take much critical thinking to understand why big trout also fall all over themselves for them too!

Help support this website: When you purchase a product through one of the Amazon links you find on this site, I get a very small commission – there’s no extra cost to you. I only highlight products that I have used and believe in. For more info, check out our Affiliate Disclosure page here.

The Best of the Best

As I noted earlier, there are dozens of companies making ripbaits – and there are a lot of really good lures out there. In fact, if you wander the aisles of your local tackle shop or flip through the pages of one of the big tackle catalogs, there’s a good chance you’ll get a little overwhelmed by all the choices. I’ve fished a bunch of different models and brands of rip baits for trout and have pretty much settled on one for most stream fishing situations: Lucky Craft’s Pointer 65.

Pointer Box They’re a bit pricey (typically around $14 to $16 a pop), but the little Pointer 65’s will get straight up medieval on rainbows, browns, cutties, dollies and brookies. They’ve got an erratic side-to-side darting action that I just don’t think any other lure can touch. I actually started fishing the larger versions for stripers and eventually added Pointers to my trout kit. Now, I hardly throw anything else – spinners, spoons and crawlers included.

At first glance, a 65-millimeter (2 ½ inches) lure seems kinda over-the-top in a small stream. It takes a little getting used to throwing them, but what you’re doing is targeting the biggest fish in the creek. But that doesn’t necessarily mean you’re going to have to sacrifice quantity for quality as the smaller fish eat ‘em too. While the 65’s are my all-around favorites, bumping up to the Pointer 78 size is a good call on larger rivers. When fishing big browns and macks on lakes (a topic I’ll cover in a future article), Pointers as large as the 5-inch No. 128 can solicit some punishing strikes.

As far as colors go, the best advice I can give you is try to match the shades of the natural trout forage in the waters you fish. Some of my favorites include Rainbow Trout, Ghost Minnow and American Shad.

That being said, color isn’t as important in this style of fishing since the lures are moving through a trout’s territory so rapidly. The idea here is to present the bait quickly enough to a fish that he doesn’t have much time to think about things.

I run my rip baits stock out of the package with only one minor modification: I pinch the barbs, which makes releasing fish much easier. Also, be sure to tie your line direct to the bait – swivels and clips will compromise the lure’s action.

Technique

As the name “ripbait” implies, the basic technique is to “rip” the lure aggressively through the water with a combination of sharp pops of the rod tip and corresponding turns of the reel’s handle. Ideally, you fish these things from a position above the water (as in a bass boat), with the rod tip pointed down and across your body towards the water. Obviously, that’s not practical in most stream fishing situations, so a modified approach is in order. Depending on the water I’m fishing, I’ll hold the rod parallel to the water or with the tip slightly up.

Fishing a stream with jerk baits I generally start out with a rip-rip-pause-rip-rip-rip-pause type of retrieve and then experiment from there. The fish will tell you how they want it on a given day – just keep varying your cadence until a pattern develops. And try to keep the speed up – remember, we’re looking for a reaction strike here.

When you’re tossing a ripbait in still water, the majority of the bites will come when the lure’s lying motionless on the pause. It’s a different deal, however, in moving water. You still want to throw pauses into your retrieve but they need to be a lot shorter in duration. Perhaps it’s better to think of them as “hesitations” instead, but they’re still extremely important. I think it’s that change from the darting action to the stop that really makes fish want to eat the lure.

Depending on the type of water you’re fishing, casts can be made directly up or downstream, though the down and across swing type of presentation seems to draw the most grabs.

Gear

As is the case with so many of the other “outside the box” methods I’ve written about in the past, nobody makes a technique-specific rod for throwing small rip baits for stream trout. Luckily, there are some light bass rods designed for drop-shotting and small darter heads that fit the bill pretty nicely (check out the Daiwa Aird, which is a nice stick for under $50).

Basically, you want a rod with a soft tip and a little bit of beef in the back end – something that won’t collapse on the hook set. Most of us are used to throwing hardware for trout on ultralight gear, but the standard 5 ½-foot ultralight stick is going to be way too soft for this style of fishing – and you’ll lose most of the fish you hook.

tailed brown Pair the rod up with a quick-retrieve spinning reel. The Abu Garcia Revo S in a sweet reel in the $100 range, while the Orra S is still nice but a few bucks less. I usually run 6-pound mono when fishing smaller streams and then bump it up to 8- or even 10-pound on larger waters. Line with some stretch like P-Line CX is a good choice because you want a little “give” in your mono when a trout decides to try destroy your plug.

Have Fun

In addition to being a super-effective technique for catching trout in moving water, tossing ripbaits is a total blast. The strikes are awesome and the results can be, too! So, go ahead and feed those big fish what they want…give ‘em “meat for dinner.”

Spring Striper Fishing: Targeting the Flats