Entry 82-2
Shaw Grigsby On Spinner Baits
A Smaller, More-Compact Spinner Bait
Editor's Note: Shaw Grigsby of Gainesville, Florida, has a TV show titled "One More Cast" on the Outdoor Life Network (OLN) that airs from January through December on Saturdays at 9:00 a.m. and then appears again two more times during the week. Shaw, a well-known professional angler, enjoys fishing all the Strike King baits, especially the spinner baits.
Grigsby: Many times when you can't get bass to bite in deep, clear water, you can scale-down the size and the profile of your lure, make longer casts and trigger strikes. Last year I was fishing in a crystal-clear lake, and I couldn't get a bite with the Compact or the Silhouette kinds of Strike King spinner baits. So I went to an even smaller spinner bait type lure, which is even more compact - the Rocket Shad. I started throwing the Rocket Shad as far as I could and ripping it out of shallow water. Then I began to see these huge wakes on the surface chasing the Rocket Shad, and I started catching bass.
In deep, clear-water lakes, many times if you give the bass an opportunity to look at and study lures, they won't take them. But if you speed up your retrieve so that when the bait comes by the bass, the fish has to react to it quickly, or the lure will get past them, then the bass will attack the lure. Often in clear-water situations, if you'll use small, compact lures like the Strike King Silhouette, Compact and Rocket Shad, you can make bass bite when they won't ordinarily bite.
Another technique that will produce strikes on these small, compact baits like the Silhouette and the Compact spinner baits is to fish them as fall baits and slow-roll them in extremely-cold or very-hot weather. That's when you need a lure that will get down deep quickly, stay near the bottom and allow you to reel it really slowly.
What I like about these two new small-profile baits from Strike King is that they add more options to the most versatile of all bass baits, the spinner bait. You can fish the Compact or the Silhouette it like a regular spinner bait by casting them out and retrieving them. You can rip them through shallow water faster than you can the bigger spinner bait, and they will fall to the bottom and swim close to the bottom quicker and better than some of the bigger spinner baits. I think the two best techniques for the Compact and the Silhouette spinner baits will be to rip them through clear water lakes and/or slow roll them through deep lakes in the winter and summer months.
