Gary Yamamoto uses the big 6" 99-series double tail hula grub Texas-rigged to flip and pitch in heavy cover. Where many others would use the old standard rubber-skirted jig of jig-and-pig fame, Gary Yamamoto has practically eliminated the use of rubber jigs. Instead, he prefers to use the 99-series hula grub Texas rigged with a 47-series bullet sinker and a 5/0 round bend straight shank hook. For flipping and pitching into heavy cover where you do not have to make long casts, you'll get a better powerset by Texas rigging with the straight shank hook rather than an offset shank hook, says Yamamoto. The 99 is a big bait, and one that bass rarely see, says Gary.While supplies last! Certain colors in this product are being discontinued. Click here
On heavy flipping gear, driving a Texas-rigged hook through
the soft plastic of a hula grub allows you to get a better hook set than using a
conventional jig-and-pig with a bulky jig head and thick fiberguard. With a hula
grub, you have a lot more time to set the hook, and a lot more confidence
they'll keep on eating it once they pick it up. With a jig, people often say to
swing as soon as possible in case the fish might let go of a jig-and-pig, but
that is not the case with a Texas-rigged spider grub. You have more time due to
the chewy hula grub body, the fact that the hook eye and hook point are not
exposed but buried in the bait, there is no stiff fiberguard. Neither is there a
protuberant chunk of jig head molded onto the hook, but a separate streamlined
bullet sinker. These are all factors that add up to bass holding Texas-rigged
spider grubs longer than jigs.
One trick Yamamoto uses is a bobber stopper to peg the bullet
sinker close to the hula grub so it all falls through the cover as one unit
rather than having the sinker separate from the bait. This is important since
the skirted front of a hula grub is too bulky to get through heavy weeds at
times. It's especially impossible if the sinker slides down the line under the
weed cover, leaving the hula grub stuck up top. The bobber stopper makes sure
the sinker and bait go everywhere together. A bobber stopper looks like a
football-shaped hard rubber grain of rice, only smaller. Each bobber stopper
comes on a micro-thin wire threader. To rig up, you insert your line through the
eye of the threader and slide the bobber stopper down onto your line. Next put
on the bullet sinker, the hook, and the hula grub, then snub the bobber stopper
back down the line so everything stays together as one unit as it slips
