How many times have you pulled a bait out of your box, thrown it into battle and felt that unnerving frustration when it doesn’t swim like it did on the last trip. Often we overlook basic components of our fishing system, not just on the bait itself, that can have a noticeable impact on the way our bait swims through the water.
Most baits these days are fine-tuned within an inch of their life and any, even tiny, modification in your system is going to affect the balance of the bait and change its intended action.
Let’s look at the five most common factors why your bait isn’t swimming like it did on your last outing.
Leader Diameter
An obvious one, but leader diameter, regardless of composition, can influence sink rate and retrieval depth due to the increased surface area of the line attached directly to the bait.
Similar to a big, wide bib on a hardbody, thicker leader will catch more water and take a lot longer to find depth either on the drop or retrieve. Depending on the bait, a 30lb shift in leader size can affect the sink rate of your bait by up to 5 seconds, especially in flowing water.
Leader Length
While leader diametre is more obvious, you probably haven’t thought about how leader length impacts how, and more importantly where, your bait tracks in the water.
This nugget of info can be used to your advantage when trying to get your bait to the bottom in a deep fast current, without the need to downsize your leader in case you hook Moby Dick. We use this tactic when hoping Jackall Transams or Doozers for cod in rivers, rather than lightening our leaders, we opt for a shorter lick of 50lb mono.
Conversely, a longer leader is advantageous if you’re attempting to keep your lure above underwater structure. In small urban lakes, we like to use 1.5m of leader to help keep unweighted swimbaits above weed beds.
Hook Size/Split Rings
As Norbs chatted about in Treble Tricks on Swimbaits, upgraded hooks and split rings can add extra, unrecognised weight to a bait and impact its natural swimming action.
Use a common sense approach here and take note of the size of the baits terminals when they come out of the packet. The biggest offender will be oversized hooks and too thick of a gauge on both your hooks and split rings.
Most baits, especially swimbaits, are finely tuned presentations and putting extra oversized hooks on a Jackall Gantarel for instance would be like putting tractor tires on Daniel Ricciardo’s F1 Red Bull car.
Leader Composition – Mono v Fluoro
The composition of your leader can have a noticeable impact on the depth at which your bait tracks through the water. For instance, the water-resistant nature of fluorocarbon will see your bait sink slightly quicker through the water and stay deeper for longer.
Conversely, due to the floating properties of monofilament leader, especially in the heavier diameters, this can cause the lure to sit slightly higher in the water column during your retrieve.
Chin Weights
Just as the swimbait craze has swept our inland waterways, so to has the demand for options to apply weight to these brand spanking new baits. While we play with any number of different chin weights depending on the depth we are targeting, it must be noted that not all swimbaits handle chin weights in the vicinity of 1 o/z to 1.5 o/z.
A chin weight that is too heavy can really mask the intended swimming action of your bait, so if you have to put a house brink on your Jackall Gantarel to get it down to the desired depth, maybe it’s time to think about tying on a spinnerbait.