Is there a soft plastic bait that can do as much as a fluke?! Brad with @Shield Outdoors is here to add a few tools to the toolbelt and give you a few new ideas for when you have a bag of flukes on your next fishing trip! What did he miss?! Comment below what soft plastic YOU think is the MOST versatile bait on the market!

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Video transcript:

Brad:
Okay. Well, as you can see, it's starting to rain. However, I got my Monster Bass May bag. It's plastic, got all my lures in there for the month. Got my rods and reel. As you can see, I've already rigged up one of these Deep Creek lures, Carolina shad. I just feel like this watermelon candy color, green and purple flake, I just feel like this is going to work for me. I have a Texas rig. I'll link as much of this stuff below as possible and they'll also be a link for the Monster Bass website below, so you can go put in your email or check out some of the stuff that they have over there.

Brad:
Here we go. Here we go. Yep, yep. Just a pickle, but it'll do. It'll do, baby. Come here. Let's get this back where it was. I mean, this is perfect. The hook pulled right through the plastic. When I'm fishing it, this hook is completely hidden. It has plenty of space to slide over whatever it needs to slide over, logs or sticks, but a little channel in here. Can you guys see that? There's a channel for the hook to set into a fish's mouth. Here we go. Here we go. Oh, my goodness. Well, right now, we're the dink slayer. I thought this was going to be a bigger fish. All right. Again, you can see the hook pulled right through. Made a good hook set. Almost got them in the eye. Luckily, we did not. Another healthy fish, but just a little pickle.

Brad:
Oh, what's up everybody. Welcome to the Monster Bass Channel. My name is Brad. I'm with Shield Outdoors. I'm repping some fresh Monster Bass gear. Today, I got notes. I got all kinds of stuff laid out. We're going to go over the Deep Creek lures, Carolina shad, and specifically talk about 20 plus ways to rig a fluke style bait. Let's get into it.

Brad:
Like I said, I'm Brad was Shield Outdoors. Welcome to the Monster Bass Channel. If you're not subscribed, click the subscribe button and then go ahead and comment down below if you've ever fished a fluke, yes or no, and your favorite way to rig it. Now, a lot of you are probably going to have the same ways, and that's why we're going to go over a bunch of different ways to just teach a variation of ways, give you something new to try. Maybe a fluke style bait is working where you're at, but maybe not the way you're rigging it. Maybe you need something to try that is new. We're going to go over that today and on the Monster Bass Channel right here, there's all kinds of instructional videos, how to videos, fishing videos, just all kinds of videos to help you learn different ways to fish in your favorite body of water. Pretty sure these little bugs are coming to kill me.

Brad:
Today specifically, we're looking at this Deep Creek lures Carolina shad. This specifically is the watermelon candy. I got a smudge. Hey, if you go to the Monster Bass website and check out their gear, it also has great lens cleaning devices. Also, if you haven't put your email in on the website, gets you the VIP list emails, gets you up to 70 something percent off lures. I'm not even joking. Go check them out. Now, one of the most popular ones you're probably going to see, or that you have used is just a simple Texas rigged hook. Now, most people are going to probably be Texas rigging their flukes. That's just the most common way, probably. In my opinion, I bet most people are Texas rigging them. Now, in the Monster Bass boxes and bags, we have gotten these spear point hooks. These would work great. I would use the three or four aught. As you can see, they have an extra wide little bump right there for you to set that hook.

Brad:
Now a fluke is often considered a soft jerkbait. You could even nose hook this. You can nose hook it on whatever size hook you want. I've done them on drop shots. I've done them on Texas rig. There's been times that I have this rigged up weedless and then I get out over open water and I will take the same bait off, so I'm not wasting baits. Then I'll nose hook it, right? You're using a different portion of the plastic. Maybe I'm reusing a plastic that was tore up in the body and you get an entirely different scenario, especially if you want to be weightless on the top of the water or just barely subsurface, or maybe you have suspended fish over deep water, a nose rigged weightless, fluke will work wonders. As you can see, this sucker is jiggly. He will dance all over the place for you and he'll dart all over the place.

Brad:
Speaking of darting, flukes actually work great with a very heavy weighted head. I actually have some called darter type. Now, these suckers are three-eighths ounce. They are heavy. These are for a deeper fishing scenario. If you're on a shallow pond, you'll probably don't want to do something like this, especially something this big, but you could put them on these darter heads and you will just have an exaggerated yawing of the lure. Instead of just having quick little movements, you will have big yaws, especially when it's down 15, 16 feet deep.

Brad:
Now, other weighted options. A weighted Texas rake. You can just continue rigging it the way that you probably have if you've used these before, but you can have a Monster Bass tungsten bullet way on the front. You feel me? You can have that free up and down the line. You can peg it. You can do all kinds of things with the Texas rig. You can weight it. You can do it weightless, but moving on from that even, you can nose hook this bad boy with a weighted wacky rig. That's right. This is actually a Berkeley weighted wacky rig hook, but you can still use a weightless wacky rig hook on this if you wanted to nose hook it. These are actually weedless wacky rig hooks, and they're a very stout hook. These are a strong hook. I don't even remember where I got these, but that'll give you just a little bit of front end weight and keep you weedless a little bit and still give you that nose hook action when you're twitching it around light cover, things like that.

Brad:
The last for my weighted section that I have written down is swim bait styles. I have a squadron head here by Strike King. You can fish this like a swim bait, especially if you plan to use it in a jerkbait style, but give it a little bit of swim or maybe swim and let it fall, swim and let it fall and also, an under spin with a weighted head. Now this is the Mustad, I believe. I have a swim bait on there just because that's what was on there when I pulled it out the tackle box, but you can put a fluke on there, especially one with this much action. This thing is so wiggly and jiggly. This would be phenomenal for situations when an underspin is working, maybe the beginning of the shad spawn with a white fluke or a white Carolina shad by Deep Creek Lures. You can get a very subtle shad style, but still get the underspinning, get some flash maybe on a bright day. Put something a little bit more narrow on there with a little less action, but you'll still get plenty of kick.

Brad:
Now talking about movement and reaction baits, belated jigs, specifically in this month's box, the Mustad ScatterShad. It's basically the same style head, but it's a bladed jig. Throw this on to bulk up your chatterbait. Throw it onto bulk up your ScatterShad. The ScatterShad, especially more so than a chatterbait. Whereas, a chatterbait, I might drag it on the bottom or burn it. With the ScatterShad, I really jerk bait this thing around and bottom hop it, and it gives a foot nominal erratic action. Perfect for a fluke. Basically, you're jerking a fluke around, a soft jerk bait added onto the back of your ScatterShad and bulk that bad boy up.

Brad:
Now, let's talk about bulking things up because sometimes you have a bait that you might be burning. You might be burning it across the top. You might be burning it across the bottom, and sometimes you need to bulk up that presence. Buzz baits, spinnerbaits, this is the Xcite Buzzfire. We actually got this in a Monster Bass bag as well. If you want to bulk up your buzz baits, I love bulking up my buzz baits, especially at night.

Brad:
Now for the last two, we're going to bust open the Monster Bass bag again, and we're going to pull out some finessey stuff. Those standout drop shot hooks. If you need a finessey presence, if they're hitting the flukes, but it only seems like they're hitting it when they're sinking or when you're not moving it, drop shot. You could do it just as good with these standout hooks that you get in the May Monster Bass bag. In fact, I brought my drop shot rod out here. We're going to try it out back. Now, maybe they don't want it off the bottom. Maybe they need it on the bottom. Maybe they want that bottom contact. You can screw a weight into the nose of this bait and Neko rig it.

Brad:
Now, what's that going to look like? It's going to look like a bait fish bobbing its nose on the bottom. Think about spawn bed fishing. Imagine a big mama bass on her bed and you come across with a Neko rig, nose-weighted, body-rigged Neko rigged hook. What's the first thing they're going to grab when they go to move that sucker? It's going to be nose down. The hook is going to be facing up. They're going to grab it from behind because they like ambushing prey. Always remember that when we're bass fishing, they like to ambush stuff a lot of times. You're going to have an excellent hook up ratio. If they buy a Neko rig fluke, you're probably going to get a solid hookup.

Brad:
Last, last, maybe we'll call these some bonuses, jig and shakey head. Along the lines of the Neko rig, you can use a shakey head to dance these across the bottom, make it look like they're feeding on the bottom or make it look like they're dying on the bottom, or you can use these jig fishing. There's a million ways to catch a fish. A lot of people will say, "Oh, there's two or three things. If they're not working, just go home." I don't like that. If I go out on the lake, I want to try everything I can to try to catch a fish, but not everybody has a boat. Some people got to shore fish. When you're shore fishing, you definitely can't take 27,000 lures.

Brad:
Hopefully this video is inspiration for those of you who don't want to take a ton of tackle. Maybe you want to take one lure and try a thousand ways to rig it. Maybe you want to take a thousand different rigs and try one piece of plastic. However it is you want to look at it, hopefully I can inspire you to go out there and keep hammering away until you start catching monster bass. As long as you have a line in the water, you have the chance to catch your PB. That's what Monster Bass is all about. Getting out there and catching your PB. If you have any questions, make sure you comment below. You can send me a message. Go over to Shield Outdoors, subscribe, say what's up. Check me out on Instagram and Facebook, and make sure you go to the Monster Bass Facebook and Instagram and subscribe right here on the Monster Bass Channel. I appreciate you being here. Peace.