The Z-Man takeover box is here and everyone is excited! For beginners, it may be the first time you use a chatterbait or any sort of bladed jig. This video is full of tips on how to rig each bait in the box and what gear you should be using when you tie on each one of the baits in this MONSTERBASS box. Tight lines!

Take your tackle selection to the next level with a MONSTERBASS Regional Pro Series subscription. The only bass fishing subscription to hand-select the best baits for where you live and fish.

Join today and save $10 off your first box. Use code SAVE10 at checkout. JOIN NOW

Video transcript:

Video transcript:

Jeff Burlingame:
What is going on, you guys? Welcome back to the MONSTERBASS channel. I'm Jeff Burlingame with Burly Fishing, and I'm here to talk to you all about the Z-Man freaking Takeover box. An absolutely insane box full of value. But specifically, we're going to talk about how to rig everything in the box and how the box was made. So you really only need that box and a fishing rod and reel and line, but then you can go catch some fish, super easy set up. This is going to be a blast to go through.

Jeff Burlingame:
Of course, before we do, if you haven't done so yet, be sure to subscribe to the MONSTERBASS channel, tons of great creators on here making awesome videos you're not going to want to miss. And if you got an extra millisecond hop on over to Burly Fishing, throw me and my buddy Paul, a subscribe as well. We appreciate you guys so much for doing so let's get into it.

Jeff Burlingame:
All right. So I already opened this box so I could do an unboxing on my channel. You'll see it if you hop over there, but let's get into the baits that we have, and then let's go rig them up and we'll talk about where we're going to fish and how going to set them up, all that jazz, you know the drill. All right. Number one, so let's start with these guys right here. First off we got the CrossEyeZ ChatterBait that one right there with the wire brush guard, fantastic. And we got the CFL ChatterBait, which is a bladed football jig. Now these two bladed jigs right here are absolutely heavy duty. We've got one built for running through cover like rock, especially in rivers. And then we've got one built for running around cover and wood specifically with this nice brush guard. So two awesome heavy duty cover options that you can use if you love throwing ChatterBait or bladed jigs, check those babies out right there.

Jeff Burlingame:
PB and J green pump. Fantastic colors. Love to throw these in dirtier waters, these in any water whatsoever because it's green pumpkin, it's just magic. But what are we going to rig on these as trailers? Well, it just so happens that we got a ton of stuff in this month's box that we can use to rig right away. So I figured why get out my other plastics when I can just use what's in the box, let's do it. Hey, and the four baits that we got this month that we're looking at would be the Finesse ShadZ in pearl. It's a straight tail, little tiny Finesse swimbait. RaZor ShadZ in fire craw, can be a fantastic spring bait coming up here real soon that has an inline tail rather than a paddle tail. And it's a jointed swimbait. We got the shorter paddle tail, three inch minnowZ here in color, the deal. And then we've got the green pumpkin goat. This is the upsize goats, 3.75 inches, kind of a straight body cross style. More like a rage tail menace from Strike King, for example.

Jeff Burlingame:
So how we going to rig these? I can tell you what right now, what looks like magic, green pumpkin and a nice straight tail. Tell you what looks amazing right now, green pumpkin plus green pumpkin. That little straight body cross style is perfect for rigging on ChatterBait bladed jigs. Now you can rig this one or two ways we can rig it as is, and you can see right now, if I push this all the way up, it's a nice length. We could also trim the body of this so that it would look maybe more like that right there, where the claws are just barely coming out or barely visible. I'm going to rig it as is.

Jeff Burlingame:
I like the claws being exposed beyond the skirt. I think that looks great. If you like him being flushed with the skirt, there you go. These are segmented. Just cut it. Nice and easy. If you have a solid pair of scissors for cutting braided line, for example, trimming these things down is super easy. Just snip snip done. The other option that we have here is that we can rig this, this way. So you're going to get this natural kicking action, which is going to look really good. Or we can rig it this way, where it's more like a paddle tail or swimbait just with a jointed tail on it, both great options. I like rigging it this way. When I want to get the bait down there a bit further, and then I'll go this way, like horizontal fashion. If I don't mind the bait riding up a little bit, especially if I'm going like over top of cover or something.

Jeff Burlingame:
So we're going to rig it that way. I'm going to pretend that I'm going over the top of some pretty heavy cover here. And again, we're going to use this as is. So I'll just take my bait here, push past this brush guard, which is actually pretty easy to push past. As you can see, you just push it into the wire there. And we can see that we want to run the hook almost all the way through the bait. So I'm just going to push her on up. I get down to this third to the last segment here, I'm going to punch through, and then we're going to pull her on up. Now, the key with Z-Man plastics with that elastic, when you get to a wire bait, keep her like that. You just want to grab the plastic and pull it over top. So I'm grabbing it and just pulling it over the top of that. It can be a pain in the butt, but you get used to it. The good news is it's not going anywhere once it gets up over that thing, just be sure not to stab yourself. When in doubt you can just grab it from the base here and just shove around in there.

Jeff Burlingame:
Okay. So we got her all rigged up. I like that. This is a hefty setup. If I'm going after bigs, this is the play to go look at how far that extends beyond the skirt. That's going to give me some nice added action visibility and something for a nice, big, old monster to chomp on. I love it. This is a fantastic setup. And one, that would be my go-to for sure. If you wanted to do this without trimming this down, the Goat does come them in smaller sizes. So you can always just get the smaller ones. Boom. There we go. One bladed jig down. All right, next up. Let's rig up that CFL bladed jig. I think I'm going to go with the deal paddle tail here, not too bad of a color combo. You got PB and J then you got some green pumpkin hints of blue.

Jeff Burlingame:
I think this will do well. Mostly, I wanted to go for it because of this three inch size is going to pair up better with this shorter hook shank you can see it's a little bit shorter than what even the CrossEyeZ was. So if we line it up, it's going to look like that. And you can see the tail doesn't extend too far beyond the hook or the skirt, which is what I want. I generally like to go dark color plus dark color, light color, light color, or a dark light combo can be really nice too. That can really stand out. It can pop in the water. Now those lead bait keepers are super easy to pull up a Z-Man plastic over and there we go. So we got this baby rigged up. She's going to look like that. There we go. Pretty heavy duty, going to have a hard kick to it. Going to have a ton of action.

Jeff Burlingame:
This would be nice, again I mentioned earlier, running along a river bed. So if you've got tons of rocks, football heads do amazing around rock cover. I know for example, near us, if we went out to Lake St. Clair, there's going to be tons of structure, tons of rock. All of that. If I get to that rocky area, I can run this thing along the bottom and just bump everything and draw a nice strike. These two setups right here, a bit heavier duty. I want to throw them on a bigger setup and a medium heavy. So maybe a seven three, seven six and get a nice bomb cast out there. I'm going to go on a higher gear ratio reel so that I have more control to get this blade vibing early and draw those strikes. So what I prefer is an eight three to one.

Jeff Burlingame:
Currently, my setup is a Lew's Tournament MP, or you can go with the Tournament XP, fantastic reel, super heavy duty, great for handling something like this. And I'm always running braid to fluoro when I'm rocking those bladed jigs as well, fluorocarbon, I think just gets the bladed jig down where you want it to be. And the braid gives me the backbone on the reel as well as easy castability when I'm bombing it out there. All right, so in this box we've got two more jig heads to throw. We got the WillowVibes and we've got the Swimbait Eyes. So there's that Swimbait Eyes. Looking awesome, just a lead base with a gold eye, fantastic simplistic, decently stout hook. And then we've got the more finessey approach. Finessier hook, a little longer shank there, wire bait keeper and that little willow blade at the front. So this is a finessier ChatterBait option and it's a quarter ounce in pearl.

Jeff Burlingame:
So what would we rig these up with? I'm going to take that RaZor ShadZ in fire craw, rig it up to that Swimbait Eyes. I think that's an easy combo that will absolutely bang. Okay. That one was a bit more of a pain in the butt to actually get up over those lead bait keepers, because it was the double bait keep with the two hooks, but there we go. So what we've got right here is a nice jointed little Swimbait with that inline tail. So this is going to be easy to rock lower in the water column, but you can see by the eye presentation there, this looks really good, pretty realistic. I really love the position of that line tie there. And we've got a stout enough hook. This is a bigger bait. We're probably going for some bigger fish. I think it looks fantastic. And with that fire craw presentation, check this baby out in spring and fall. You're probably going to get some good hits on that.

Jeff Burlingame:
So let's go ahead and get finessey with the last piece here. So we got the WillowVibe and we got the Finesse ShadZ. So they're going to go hand in hand, we got a pearl head, we got a pearl plastic. Let's do it. Got a nice skinny body with this plastic. So be sure to be careful about how you're rigging it, so as not to make it all crooked. Nice and easy. Then just take that elastic, pull it up over that bait keeper. And there we go. Nice, easy rig. And you can see it's got like a nice little belly to it there. It's got a straight tail on it. This is going to be a super subtle finessey presentation. I think it's going to be fantastic.

Jeff Burlingame:
If you've got some finicky bass, you're dealing with that colder weather, ice melt, whatever, you get into March especially March, April this is going to be a great bait to throw around. Look at that thing. That's fantastic. Still a decent enough length. It's a smaller profile, but decent length that it can definitely draw some bigger fish. I love this setup. That's awesome. All right. What are we throwing these things on? For the finessey setup with that WillowVibe, I still want to higher gear ratio, gives me more control to get the blade vibing and doing its job. So I would probably still throw this on the same ChatterBait setup, medium heavy, maybe slightly unnecessary since it's finessey. So if you potentially have a lighter rig, that would be a way to go. I'd like this on a medium bait caster setup, high gear ratio. And again, just go braid to fluorocarbon, but go with a lighter line.

Jeff Burlingame:
So if you go 15 or 20 pound braid, that would be great down to a 10 to 12 pound fluorocarbon. This thing will rock it. As for this guy, just throw it on your jig setup. It's a swimbait jig. So whatever you're using for that, probably a medium heavy seven three, seven six, for your jig setup. And you're probably going heavier braid, so 30 pound plus. And then if you're getting finicky fish, go ahead and tie some fluorocarbon to the end of that and you'll be good. Especially since we're moving this bait around. And there we go, boom. All sorts of stuff, mostly jigs and plastics. So if you pay attention to the setup from the box, we've got the super heavy duty from the football jig to the cover set up with the CrossEyeZ ChatterBait, and you can utilize all the plastics with all the baits in here very easily for plastics, for jigs. There we go. So here's our two bladed jigs.

Jeff Burlingame:
Then we had that Finesse with the WillowVibes and we had the straight up swimbait jig with the RaZor ShadZ. Couple of great combos, definitely going to get the job done. Definitely going to catch you some fish. You guys are going to have a fantastic time with this box. So if you haven't renewed your subscription or picked up a subscription from MONSTERBASS, do so in February, this is probably the best box we've ever dropped. I am drooling over it and you guys are going to love it too and it's going to catch you a ton of fish. So be sure to get the box. And of course, if you guys like the content, be sure to subscribe to the MONSTERBASS channel, go check out Burly Fishing. If you would, we appreciate you for doing so, and then come check out our lives. MONSTERBASS is live most Thursdays, we're live every Thursday, 8:00 PM Eastern. So hop on over to Burly Fishing Thursdays at 8:00 PM Eastern or right after the MONSTERBASS live, come over. We'll be nice and warm and welcoming. And we're talking to super cool people in the fishing industry. You're not going to want to miss it. Thank you guys so much for watching. I hope you're having an awesome day and we'll see you on the next video.