Entry 166-5

Shaw Grigsby

Part 5: The Perfect Skirt

Editor’s Note: When you make $1 million traveling all over the country catching little green fish, you must have learned plenty about bass fishing. Shaw Grigsby of Gainesville, Florida, the host of “One More Cast with Shaw Grigsby” TV show, has learned more than just a little bit about bass fishing. One of the nation’s leading pro-fishermen who’s made nine Bassmaster Classic appearances, has had 47, top-10 finishes on the BASS circuit and has won eight tournaments, Grigsby’s proven he’s one of the best bass fishermen in the nation. Strike King has its pros fish with the company’s new products to provide feedback for the company on how to make its products better and to learn more about how to fish them. This week Grigsby will tell you how to fish the new products that Strike King has introduced and how they can improve your fishing.

Question: What do you think of the Perfect Skirt?

Grigsby: Strike King has built its name on building quality spinner baits. To have the best spinner bait on the market, you have to have good component parts. So, Strike King spent a lot of time, money and energy to get the right kind of blades, the right kind of hook, the right kind of ball bearing swivel and the right kind of wire. But now this year the company has spent time and money researching what will constitute the perfect skirt. And the new skirt on our Premiere Plus spinner baits has many features that other skirts on other spinner baits don’t have.

For instance, you can customize the skirt so that you have dark strands of skirt on top, light strands of skirt material under the dark strands and orange strands of material under the light strands. So, instead of having all the different colors of the various strands mixed-up in the skirt of the spinner bait, Strike King’s skirt colors are actually layered like the colors on a real fish. With the new Perfect Skirts, I can have a skirt that almost identically mimics the color of the baitfish I want it to imitate. If I’m trying to imitate a golden shiner, I can select a Perfect Skirt that has a dark back, a gold flake in the middle and a pearl on the bottom of the skirt.

These new Perfect Skirts also have magic tails. With these new skirts, we’ve eliminated the need for trailers. The long strands in the skirt extend out past the bulk of the skirt and cover-up, hide and give action to the trailer hook. The skirt also flares and puffs out and has a pulsating action to it as you stop and start it. And, it also has a rhythmic pulse that picks up the motion of the blades and pulses that action through the strands of the skirt.

I’m now the biggest advocate there ever was of using a trailer hook on a spinner bait. You can bet that the first cast I make with any spinner bait on any day I fish, there’ll be a trailer hook on the back of that spinner bait. The only reason I’ll ever take a trailer hook off a spinner bait is if I absolutely can’t work the spinner bait through the cover because of the trailer hook. What you don’t want to do is miss the first one or two bass that strikes at your spinner bait, and then decide you need to be using a trailer hook. If you start off with a trailer hook, you’re going to catch those first one or two bass that short-strike your spinner bait, if you have that skirt on the spinner bait.

My favorite color spinner bait is the Bleeding Bait Series. I like the red wire, the red hooks and the red strands in the skirt. I believe that the Bleeding Bait Series is most-effective in grass lakes. I don’t know what it is about the color red on a spinner bait in grass lakes that really turn the bass on, but I do know that red is deadly effective in the lakes I fish that have grass in them. I’ll often use a solid-red spinner bait; and I never leave home without one. We’ve added the solid-red spinner bait to our Premier Plus line this year. Red’s a key color that you have to have if you’re spinner bait fishing.

One reason I’m really excited about working with Strike King is that each year they talk to the bass-fishing pros on their team and try and determine what Strike King can do to improve the lures that they already have, improve the colors that they already have and develop a new lure to meet a bass-fishing problem that the pros have encountered on the fishing circuit. This year I believe that Strike King has outdone itself.

Shaw Grigsby

Part 5: The Perfect Skirt

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