How to Fish a Neko Rig: Bass Fishing Masterclass

This lure looks like a wacky rig, and you can fish it like a wacky rig — but it isn’t one. It’s the Neko rig, and for years I called a weighted wacky rig a Neko without being quite right about it. In this masterclass I’m going to set the record straight: what actually makes a Neko a Neko, how to rig it the right way (hook point direction matters more than you’d think), the finesse and creature versions most anglers never try, the gear for each, and how and where to fish it. By the end you’ll have the confidence to tie one on and catch a bass on it yourself.

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Neko Rig Quick Reference

Let’s get my own mistake out of the way first. For years I called a weighted wacky rig a Neko rig. It doesn’t hurt anybody to say that, but it isn’t technically correct — and if I’m going to teach these techniques, I need my words right. So consider this my correction for past videos. A Neko rig can look like a wacky rig and fish in similar ways, but they are not identical. In fact, a Neko doesn’t even have to be a soft plastic worm. Every plastic on my table — flukes, craws, bugs, dice — can be Neko rigged, and I’ll show you each one.

A wacky rig is a symmetrical straight-tail worm — my two favorites are the Strike King Ocho and a thinner finesse stick worm — with a hook threaded through the middle. My hook for both wacky and Neko is the VMC Redline Weedless Wacky in a size 1 or 2, and lately I use the smaller size 2 for almost everything, worms and creature baits alike. Rig it so there’s equal mass on either side of the hook (not always the exact center), and both halves flap evenly as it falls. That slow, even fall is where a wacky rig gets most of its bites. If you want your worms to last more than one fish, slide a plastic O-ring on with an O-ring tool and thread the hook under the ring, parallel to the worm.

A Neko rig adds a small nail weight to one end. That changes the whole presentation: it falls faster, so it probably gets fewer bites on the fall, but it gets far more bites as you hop it across the bottom with the weight leading. And because one end is weighted, the worm no longer has to be perfectly symmetrical — plenty of the plastics I Neko are purpose-built Neko worms that don’t look like a stick bait at all.

Four components: the worm, the hook, a ring, and a nail weight. Start with your worm and the size 2 VMC Redline. Then you need something to attach the hook to. An O-ring works, but my new favorite is the VMC crossover ring, which comes in sizes 4, 5, and 6 — the 4 and 5 for thin worms, the 5 or 6 for an Ocho or a standard Yamamoto-size stick. A size 6 has a little more give, so it doesn’t squeeze the plastic as hard and may not tear as easily. Position the ring anywhere from dead center (like a wacky) to slightly off-center toward the head, then thread the hook on with the point facing toward the tail. That direction is crucial, and I’ll explain why in a second.

Last, the nail weight — and a little dab will do you. I hardly ever go above 1/16 ounce on a worm. My whole range for finesse Nekos is 1/32 to 3/32 ounce. There are only two real styles of weight: screw-in and push-in, each in tungsten or lead. Honestly I don’t know which I like more. The one hard rule is Elaztech: if you’re Neko rigging something like a Strike King Baby Z-Too, a screw-in weight is almost impossible to get in, so use a push-in. For normal plastics, find what works for you. Push the weight all the way into the head of the worm and you’re done — a fully rigged Neko ready to catch fish in the column or hop the bottom.

Why the Hook Point Has to Face Up

You’re retrieving a Neko across the bottom with the weight leading, so the hook has to ride point up — toward the tail, not toward the weight. Two reasons. First, weedlessness: hop a Neko past a stick with the hook facing down and even that little weed guard won’t save you. Point up, it slides over. Second, and bigger, is hookup ratio. I’ve caught probably a hundred bass on this exact setup, and when the hook faces down, almost every fish is hooked in the tongue or the side of the mouth — and those are the fish that throw the lure. When they bite down on a hook facing up, it pins them in the roof of the mouth, and your hookup and landing ratio goes way up.

Here’s where the Neko really separates from the wacky. I split Nekos into two families: finesse Nekos — your worms and flukes — and creature Nekos — creature baits, craws, bugs, and even oddball plastics like dice and urchins. Sure, you could try to weightless-wacky a creature bait, but I don’t think it would be nearly as effective as it is with a small nail weight. Rigged as a Neko, a creature bait almost acts like a finesse jig or a Ned-rig presentation: when you hop it, the claws and tails flap, then rise back up as it falls and settles. I’ve caught giants this way, and most people never try it.

Rigging a Creature Neko With the Neko Hack

It’s nearly identical to the finesse rig with one extra component: the Geecrack Neko Hack, a plastic insert that comes in small, medium, and large. Medium and large are the most useful; small comes in handy for tiny BFS-style plastics and the 2.5-to-2.8-inch Bellows Gill. Poke the Hack through the bottom of the bait so its T-shaped prongs lock into the plastic, find the little hole that pokes out the other side, slide your hook through it — point up — then snip off the long prong with scissors. Finish with a nail weight in the head, same as the worm.

One correction to my own rule: I said I never go above 1/16 ounce, and for creature Nekos that’s wrong. I’ll throw 1/16 all the way up to 1/4 ounce here, because these baits fall in the same category as a Texas-rigged Rage Bug, which you’d fish on a 1/8 or 1/4 bullet weight. You can absolutely go super-finesse with the tiny sizes too — but you have the range.

The rule is simple: fish a Neko on whatever combo you’d normally throw a bait of that size and weight on. A finesse Neko is the same weight class as a weightless soft plastic, a light shaky head, or a light jighead minnow — so it goes on my spinning setup: a Lew’s Signature Series 6-foot-10 medium extra-fast paired with the reel I’ll die on a hill for, the Lew’s Custom Lite shallow-spool spinning reel. It’s the only spinning reel a freshwater angler ever needs. I spool it with 21-lb Seaguar PEX8 braid (a Japanese braid that runs closer to 15-lb by US standards — anywhere from 10 to 20 lb braid works) and a 12-lb Seaguar Pounce fluorocarbon leader.

Creature Nekos carry slightly heavier weights and a bigger profile, so I throw them on a baitcaster — my small-crankbait, finesse-application setup: a 6-foot-8 medium fast rod, 12-lb straight fluorocarbon, and a Tournament Pro reel that casts light stuff beautifully. Again, if the weight and size of the Neko matches what you’d normally throw on a combo, that’s the combo.

The retrieve isn’t much different from any other soft plastic worm. Make a good long cast over your area, let it sink all the way to the bottom — that part is crucial — and then slowly lift and hop it back to you for the entire retrieve. How high you lift depends on what’s down there. On a clean, flat bottom — sand, clay, rock — you can get away with a tiny 4-to-6-inch rod-tip twitch. That just gets the weight ticking along, hopping exactly like a shaky head. Some days you can straight drag it.

But if your pond or lake has laydown logs and especially aquatic vegetation, that little hop will get you snagged and won’t let the bass see the lure clearly. When the bottom isn’t clean, lift it more like a traditional Texas rig — one, two, three feet off the bottom — to get it up and out of the junk and let it fall back in. Around grass you’ll often feel it grab a strand; a quick snap usually clears the bait, and that snap itself frequently triggers the strike.

As an instructor I’d feel like a fraud if I couldn’t show you the technique working. My favorite personal Neko catch came at Caddo Lake on the Texas–Louisiana border, fishing this exact finesse setup around shallow cypress trees. The fish were sitting in the crooks between two trees, and after fixing my upside-down hook, I pitched into a gap, felt the thump, and landed a chunky four-pound Louisiana bass with a yellow spot on its tail — proof the Neko works in snaggy, shallow wood even though it isn’t fully weedless.

The other one I was behind the camera for. At REDCREST a few years back in North Carolina, Alton Jones Jr. — one of the best pros on the planet, who I traveled with for five years — was catching big spotted bass on deep dock pilings. A wacky rig took too long to sink to them, so he switched to a 3/32-ounce Neko, got down faster, made more presentations, and caught the biggest bass of the event: a 5-pound-7-ounce spotted bass. That’s the Neko’s whole advantage over the wacky in one fish.

Final Thoughts

The Neko rig is simple once you understand what it actually is: a soft plastic with a nail weight in the head and a hook riding point-up. Rig your worms and flukes light on spinning gear, rig creature baits and dice with a Neko Hack on a baitcaster, let it hit bottom, hop it — and let the fish tell you whether they want it falling or hopping. I’ve thrown the Neko far more this year than I expected to, and I don’t see that changing. For the two techniques it sits between, my drop shot masterclass covers the finesse side and my shaky head masterclass covers the bottom-hopping side.

Related masterclasses: Shaky Head · Drop Shot · Texas Rig · Creature Baits · Damiki Rig & Jighead Minnow · Coike / Urchin · Fishing Line

Source: Based on video content from TylersReelFishing — “Learn To Fish The NEKO RIG In 2026! (Bass Fishing Masterclass)” · youtube.com/@tylersreelfishing