Bass Fishing Hacks
Simple Hacks and Tips to Help You Catch More Bass
19 Best Bass Fishing Hacks
1) Use fingernail polish for adding eyes on your bass jigs and adding color to your beaten up hard baits. You would be amazed on how much better a lure with eyes gets hit. All that you need to do is get yourself some black and white nail polish and you are good for most scenarios. Some hardcore fishermen like to add red nail polish to their soft plastics to mimic a wounded fish.
Nail polish is also a great way to temporarily repair a broken ceramic fishing guide. Let’s say that your metal ring around your ceramic guide broke or rusted and your circular ceramic guide is now dangling on your fishing line. All that you have to do is put it back in place and slather a whole bunch of fingernail polish on both sides where the metal and the ceramic meet.
Let it dry for 10 minutes or so and you can often get a few more hours of fishing done with that broken guide. Super glue works better if you have that.
2) Put your fishing line in a bucket when you spool up. Are you tired of spooling up your reels and getting a whole bunch of twisted line and backlashes? All that you have to do is put your line of spool in a bucket of water or the sink and start filling up your reel with line. This will eliminate your line twisting issues.
3) Fill your baitcasting reel half full for less backlashes. Do you really need all of that line when you go out bass fishing? A bass won’t peel off 100 yards of like like a tarpon or a shark will so why have more line than you need?
Fill your spool half way and you will get a ton less backlashes and a ton more fishing and catching done. AND you will save a lot of money over time because you will need less braided line. That stuff is expensive!!!
4) Mix toothpaste with hand soap to get fish smell off your your hands. The abrasiveness of the toothpaste will scrape off those stubborn smells that the soap alone can’t handle.
5) Store live worms with a freeze pack to keep them fresh longer. Live worms are an often overlooked bass bait. They are great baits for finicky bass in lakes with a lot of fishing pressure. You want to have happy vivacious worms don’t you? Bass like them with lots of wiggle in them.
The cold will slow their metabolism and keep them calm and less active. Once they hit the warm water they will liven right back up again. Don’t worry they won’t drown. Night crawlers breathe through their skin and need moisture to do that. They come out after a rain storm because it is easier for them to get around not because they will drown in their flooded burrows.
6) Store live crawdads with a freeze pack and a wet towel to keep them alive longer. This is the same principle as with the live worms. The crawdads will go into a state of low activity and their metabolisms will slow down. This keeps them alive for a long time as long as you can keep them wet so that they can breathe efficiently.
Keep the towel wet and change it often so the crawdads waste products don’t kill them all. This works for shrimp too.
7) Add a zip tie and a split ring to your rod to hold your hooks. Those wire hook holders break most of the time. Some rods don’t come with them in the first place. So you got your new rod and the hook loop broke already. What are you going to do now to keep those hooks secure.
Just add a zip tie and a split ring to the rod underneath or above the reel. This all depends upon where you like them to be. Just put the zip tie through the split ring and cinch it down. You can hook your lures right onto it. A rubber band will work just fine too.
8) Switch out your rod guide closest to the reel on spinning rods with a bigger one for a much longer cast. This trick will add quite a bit of distance to your casts. The most inefficient action of the line is occurring as the line leaves the reel in spirals and comes into contact with the first guide. The larger the opening means that there will be less friction on the line and you can cover more water per cast.
9) Turn those short strikes into hook ups by having sharp scissors with you. Cut down those skirts, tails, soft plastics, frog legs…….. any time the bass are coming up short with their strikes. You might just have to slow your retrieve but often times your bait is just too big. When that is the case shorten those lures by a little bit and get more bass in the boat.
10) Use old wine corks for slide bobbers. Just stick a plastic straw through the middle and you are good to go. The wine cork doesn’t usually need a plastic straw to work but some fishermen swear by using the straw. You have to glue it in place usually.
11) Put your stinky baits in a gallon zip lock bag. You will never get that smell out of your tackle box or boat if you let is spill. The first time that I smelled a Berkeley Gulp I dry heaved. Those things are stinky!!! Then of course, I was so smart that I put the opened bag back into my tackle bag.
Long story short; I ended up throwing away the tackle bag because I couldn’t quite get the smell out of it. Bring a gallon zip lock bag or two for your smelly baits and you will be glad that you did.
12) Use a drink koozie to keep your spools of line from unraveling. Of course, you are not having any adult beverages when you are fishing. BUT if you did happen to have a few drink koozies around on your boat, then you can use them to store your fishing line so it doesn’t get messy. A rubber band or your lady’s hair tie will work too.
13) Use a foam noodle to store your different jigs and crankbaits. Do not put them right back into your tackle box when they are wet. Instead put them on a foam noodle to keep them out of the way and easy to access if yo need them again. This let’s them dry and keeps them ready to use.
14) Use rubber bands to keep your treble hooks from hooking all of the other lures. Let’s say that you have a whole bunch of hard baits with 3 treble hooks each on them. That means that each lure has nine chances to hook the one next to it in your tackle box.
Some rubber bands or hair ties will remedy this problem and keep them from being a tangled mess. You can also use zip ties but then you have to cut them to get access to the lures.
15) Use safety pins to organize your different hooks. Keep your hooks orderly and from tangling with all of the other hooks in your tackle box with a safety pin. Just run it through the eyes of your hooks. This is a great way to organize your beads and swivels for Texas and Carolina rigs too.
16) Use toothpicks to keep your bullet weights locked on the line where you want it. Sometimes you want your bullet weights to stay put on the line. You can crimp it their but a toothpick will often work just as well. Just shove the tip into the bottom and the top of the weight where you want it to stay and the water will swell up the wood to keep it in place.
This is a great way to keep your worm from sliding down the hook too. Just bury the eye of the hook in the top of the worm and shove the toothpick into the plastic; through the eye of the hook and into the plastic on the other side.
Break it off and your worm will not slide down your hook anymore.
17) Don’t pay for ice anymore. It is too expensive. Get your old milk jugs and add a table spoon full of salt to the water. Stir in the salt and freeze the milk jugs. Salt water freezes colder than freshwater does. If you want to drink the water, then don’t add the salt and you will have cold water to drink all day. Either way you will have cold drinks in your cooler all day with just a couple of frozen milk jugs.
18) Use those silica packets to stop your hooks and lures from rusting. We have all bought clothes and other things that come with those little white packets of silica in them. Those are to stop any moisture from mildewing our clothes. The silica absorbs the moisture so that mildew won’t grow.
Don’t throw those packets out. Save those little guys and put them in your tackle boxes to help stop your hooks from rusting.
19) Use a black sharpie to darken a foot or so of your braided lines when you tie directly to your lures. You can tie braided lines straight to your lures in a few different scenarios without losing any bites.
If you like fishing with frogs and jigs in heavy cover, then you can tie braided line directly to your lures. You can tie directly to walk-the-dog and popping types of top water lures too.
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