Entry 200-4
What Makes Him Good – Shaw Grigsby
Part 4: Bet on the Zero, the Spit-N-King and the Bitsy Bug
Editor’s Note: Fifty-one year old Shaw Grigsby, a longtime member of the Strike King team, has won over $2 million in tournament bass fishing. He’s fished professionally since 1984 and he has traveled with and fished against the Strike King pros his entire professional career. He’s also the host of the “One More Cast” TV show on the Versus Channel. If you interview, as I have, a large number of tournament fishermen and ask them, “What makes Shaw Grigsby so good?” they’ll say that Grigsby is one of the best sight fishermen in the nation. Grigsby does have the eye of an eagle. He can spot bass from long distances, swoop in close and deliver the lure that puts the fish in his boat. Grigsby also sees and understands what makes other fishermen great and has learned from them.
Question: If you count the Zulu and the Z Too as tied for second-place in your choices of lures, what’s your third choice for a sight-fishing bait?
Grigsby: I like the Strike King Zero. This bait is a tremendous sight-fishing lure. There’s two ways to fish the Zero. You can hook it like you will normally hook a plastic worm, Texas-style, except you don’t add a weight. You just let the Zero fall and wiggle as it falls. However, many times when you’re sight-fishing, if you twitch your rod, the Zero will move too far out in front of the bass to solicit a strike. You’re actually taking the Zero out of the bass’s strike-zone. So, instead of Texas rigging the Zero, I’ll rig the Zero wacky-style by putting the hook in the center of the bait.
I like the octopus-style hook when I’m wacky-rigging the Zero. When you throw the bait out, it wiggles on both ends. 
More importantly, when the Zero falls in front of the bass, instead of moving away from the fish, it flexes in the middle, which causes the bait to move straight up and down, not forward. Rigged this way, the Zero tries to stay in the same place. You can shake the Zero and get a lot of action out of it without moving it. This lure and this technique is a dynamite method for catching bass when you’re sight fishing. If I can’t catch a bass on these soft-plastic lures I’ve described, I’m really hurting.
If I have to pick fourth bait, it will have to be a top-water lure like the Spit-N-King. Or, I try to catch them on a crankbait. Truly, top-water baits and crankbaits represent my last-ditch effort to try catching a bass I see. Yes, they’ll produce, and yes, they will catch bass you can see, but in my opinion they are not as effective as my first three soft-plastic choices. Now I’ll have to say occasionally I have caught a bass on a jig- well, now that I think about it, I’ve caught quite a few sight fish on a jig.
I like flipping the Bitsy Bug with a small Denny Brauer Chunk, made fro
m the new Elaztec. I like it in the crawfish colors. When I flip it out in front of a big bass, the fish often will eat it because they think that bait’s a small crawfish. Bass hate crawfish, even though it’s one of their main food sources. If you can get a little crawfish out in front of a bass that’s moving, you can just about bet that bass will eat it. This technique is also deadly if you’re fishing for bedding fish. When you see a bass that’s not moving, you can pitch that Bitsy Bug up close to it, and that bass just can’t stand that bait. They’ve got to eat it. Bass are territorial, and they don’t like crawfish in their territory. If you bring that Bitsy Bug crawfish-looking bait into the bass’s region, the bass will eat it. So I catch a lot of bass on the Bitsy Bug jig, and I’d just about forgotten about it.
