Using artificial and natural baits offers anglers several ways to connect with fish, but the way they are rigged can sometimes make a bigger difference in the number and quality of fish caught.
Anglers using soft-plastic imitation shrimp have two main options: free-lining and float-fishing. Both methods have their merits and drawbacks.
Suspending an artificial shrimp under a popping cork is by far the most popular. Both Jeff Yates of TyJo Knot Charters and Amy Little of Fine Lines Charters will use a popping cork to suspend a shrimp at a specified depth, usually when fishing in water less than 4 feet deep. The popping cork can be worked to create a surface commotion to draw redfish, imitating shrimp at the surface, falling back slowly to a specified depth. And the shrimp will often just suspend right in the strike zone where reds and other predators just cannot resist.
However, popping corks become less effective in deeper water. Yates will typically free cast his D.O.A. shrimp and work along the bottom and in the middle of the water column.
“I like to cast towards the bank or in shallow water and work it back to the boat into deeper water with the current,” Yates said. “Being able to free-cast the lures gives you more options and gets the lure to the fish at a wide variety of depths.”
During the September shrimp run, shrimp will be holding fairly tight to the bottom on the low end of the tide, and free-lining a D.O.A. shrimp allows anglers to put the artificial shrimp right where the redfish would expect these baits to live.
Egret Baits has come out with the V-rig that allows anglers to fish with two Vudu Shrimp at the same time. The V-rig is made up of two stiff wires and a collection of snap swivels to allow two shrimp to be fished at the same time to give more action, more movement in the water and another hook, too.
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