Jighead Minnow Bass Fishing - Masterclass

This lure goes by a dozen names — mid-strolling, hover rig, hover shot, hover-strolling, the Damiki rig, hanging a minnow, moping. It might sound confusing with that many names, but it's honestly one of the simplest lures you can fish. In this masterclass I'm going to teach you the jighead minnow technique from A to Z, beginner to advanced, for every angler no matter where you fish.

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Here's the proof it works: Jeff Gustafson won a Bassmaster Classic — $300,000 — on this technique. Jacob Wheeler won $100,000 on it. Me? I've hardly won a dime with it, but I've had a ton of fun, and that's priceless. This is a baitfish imitation technique, and if the bass in your water are feeding on baitfish at any time of year, and the water isn't super muddy, you can catch them on it — with or without forward-facing sonar. I'll prove that on video.

Jighead Minnow Quick Reference

This imitates a small baitfish — a threadfin, a blueback herring, whatever the small bait is in your water. It's not imitating bluegill (mostly), it's definitely not a crawfish, and it's usually not a giant gizzard shad. Unlike a paddle-tail swimbait, this bait has no paddle tail on purpose. A swimbait's action comes from that boot tail on a straight retrieve. This technique thrives on the rock of the bait — side to side, with maybe a little tail wiggle — and that rock only happens when the bait has no tail.

It's a fluke-style plastic, cylindrical, usually 3.5 to 6 inches, white or a white variety. I've tried a bunch of brands, and my number-one is the Strike King Baby Z-Too (I do work with Strike King). The reason is the Elaztech material. There's nothing wrong with a Zoom Super Fluke or a Strike King Caffeine Shad — the slight problem is they're salt-infused, so they sink faster. This technique is called strolling because you want a nice slow leisurely retrieve, and the heavier or faster-sinking the bait, the quicker you have to reel to hold your depth. A saltless plastic floats higher and lets you stroll it far more effectively.

One bonus of the Elaztech material: it lasts. A single pack lasts me the entire scoping season — I can catch a dozen or more fish on one bait without it tearing.

For weight, this is mostly a wintertime technique for me — fish suspending in the column, chasing bait. I want it heavy enough to fall down to them, but not so heavy I have to burn it to hold depth. So a 1/16-ounce or 1/8-ounce head are my two best. My favorites are the Outkast Tackle Golden Eye swimbait head — I've worked with Outkast for years and they make awesome stuff. The 1/8-ounce, 3/0 fits the Baby Z-Too and gives a great hookup ratio; the 1/8-ounce, 4/0 I save for the full-size Z-Too.

The most important detail — subtle as it seems — is the line tie at or as close to 90° as you can get, meaning the eye points straight up, not out at a 45. Paired with a thinner-wire hook (this is a spinning-rod technique), that's what lets the bait rock side to side cleanly. Other jigheads can work if you give them the right shake, but the 90° tie is dialed for this.

Rigging It Straight

Lay the jighead next to the Z-Too and find where the hook bend lines up — that's your exit point. Thread it dead straight down the center. Because it's a saltless plastic, the material is stiff and hard to rig, so take your time (the bait's going to last a dozen fish, so it's worth it). I like a head without a screw lock here, because this material is almost impossible to screw in. Push the plastic up the head, then grab it and snap it up the shank four or five times to even it out, pinch the keeper into it, and you've got a perfect presentation in about twelve seconds. A fish can grab it and pull and it isn't coming off.

Shaking the rod tip super quickly and ever-so-slightly through the entire cast is very hard to do on a baitcaster or even a BFS setup. So this is best on a spinning rod, even up into the 1/4-ounce-and-above heads. My exact combo is my most expensive one — a 6-ft-9 medium-light rod (around $400) with a light custom spinning reel (only about $150, a heck of a deal). I like my most finesse techniques on my highest-quality rod so I can feel every bite. But plenty of good budget medium-light rods work great, and I've linked several below — whatever your favorite drop shot combo is, as long as it's medium light, that's your jighead minnow rod too.

You can use a medium as long as it's a fast or moderate-fast taper. Avoid an extra-fast tip on a medium-heavy — you'll have a hard time using the slack of your line to shake the bait and roll it side to side.

For line I run a thin 10-to-15-lb braid — it casts far and I rarely get wind knots — on a 300-size reel, which I feel lets line fly off the spool a little easier. For the leader I go with a standard 10-to-12-lb fluorocarbon (a thin leader-grade material). You can get more finesse and drop to 4-to-6-lb if you want, but I catch plenty at 10–12, and it's strong enough to last a lot of fish. I connect braid to leader with an FG knot (that my editor ties — I still haven't learned).

Cast it out, let it sink to your depth (count it down if you don't have electronics), then start the retrieve. Because there's no paddle tail, a straight reel does nothing — you have to add the shake. And I don't mean working a flutter spoon or hopping a jig. It's a very minimal shake — four to six inches at the rod tip — almost exactly like walking a topwater frog or spook, letting a little slack into the line. You can do it rod-tip up, to the side, or down, whatever feels comfortable.

The trick is your wrist. Think of a guitar player strumming — the hand looks like Jell-O, like there are no bones in it. Slow steady reel, maybe one handle-turn every second to second-and-a-half, and your pointer finger adds the little shake throughout. Jell-O hand is the whole secret.

Because it's so similar to a paddle-tail swimbait — cast and retrieve with a slightly different action — you throw it in the exact same spots: steep rock banks, over brush piles, over rock piles, along the edge of grass, the same water you'd throw a swimbait or even an Alabama rig. With forward-facing sonar I'm targeting individual fish or groups I see in the column or on the bottom. Without it, in ponds or lakes, you fish it anywhere and everywhere you'd throw a traditional soft-plastic swimbait.

I'd be a fool not to mention the original name and purpose — the Damiki rig. Before anyone thought about forward-facing sonar, anglers used this vertically: hanging the minnow, or as my friend Jeff Gipson called it, moping. They'd mark a fish or a group on 2D sonar, drop this rig straight down with the buoyant plastic and 90° tie, let the rod tip sit, then watch the fish rise to it and slowly reel up, playing keep-away until it ate. It excelled in really cold, clear water. Forward-facing sonar let us take this technique and use it in a far superior way — casting away from the boat — but you can absolutely still drop it down and mope up a big one.

Final Thoughts

That's a mountain of information, but the technique itself is simple: a saltless fluke-style minnow on a light 90°-tie jighead, a medium-light spinning rod, and a slow stroll with a tiny Jell-O-hand shake. It catches fish all over the country for me, in ponds and from bass boats, with and without technology. If you want the polar-opposite big-bait cousin of this — same idea, but with paddle tails and five or six of them at once — check out my Alabama Rig masterclass. It's a giant-bass technique every angler should learn.

Source: Based on video content from TylersReelFishing — “The Best Lure On The Planet Right Now... (Jighead Minnow Masterclass)” · youtube.com/@tylersreelfishing