I made another fishing trip on Cedar Creek yesterday, fishing mid lake. The lake has risen more than a foot after last week’s rain, and is now less than three feet low. That’s still low enough to make the lake ugly, but more boat ramps work better at this level. And the cover at my fishing spots is better at this level. The water is much dirtier after all that rain. The lower part of mid lake only had a couple of feet of visibility, and the upper part of it had less than a foot. I haven’t seen this part of the lake that dirty in quite a while. It was in the low 40’s yesterday morning, but warmed to the mid 60’s, and the wind stayed light all day, so it was a nice day to be out. There are obviously still a lot of holiday people at the lake, because I saw more boats on the water than I have in quite a while.

I’ve been bass fishing a milk run on the mid lake regularly all fall, and it’s been interesting how the bite has changed as we’ve progressed from fall to winter. All fall, I’ve been fishing boat docks, rocky points, and the rocks on sea walls. I’ve fished a lot of main lake banks, as well as some coves. I’ve been using a Big TRD on a tiny child rig and a crankbait. The tiny child rig was best for the thick cover of the docks, and the crankbait worked best on the rocks. By late fall, coves that didn’t have deep water very nearby had stopped working. Then, the bite got tougher and tougher on the docks, even while rocks on sea walls between them were still holding a few fish.

But the bite on the rocks was getting tougher and tougher. That didn’t surprise me. Bass using rocks for cover are open water fish, and open water bass can be very finicky. From my earliest tournament days, I’ve loved fishing rocks. More than a few of the biggest bass I’ve caught have come from rocks. On days when bass there are more aggressive, they will hit many baits such as crankbaits or spinnerbaits or a big bass jig. But there are days when they can be extremely tough to catch, and I knew the falling water temperatures and thus the bass’ slower metabolisms were making that the case now. It’s been a very mild winter so far, but water temperatures have slowly fallen to the low 50’s, and that seems to be the point where you end up with consistently finicky winter bass.

That’s why I added the Ned rig to my lure arsenal. I’ve always just abandoned the bass when they got this finicky in late fall or early winter, and switched to crappie fishing. But I wanted to see if I could continue to catch some bass this winter. I knew it was time for a true finesse bait, and a Ned rig is among the best of finesse baits. After the crankbait bite had gotten so tough on the rocks, I had managed to catch a few bass on the rocks with the tiny child rig, but that bite kept getting tougher too. It was the Ned rig that showed me there were still bass on those rocks, and I was surprised at how many bass I caught on them.

But now, even those sea wall bass seem to be gone. Only points with rocks and very deep water very nearby worked yesterday. I had seen that coming, and identified another spot to add to what I had for the winter, and I’m glad I did. That was one of the few productive spots I had yesterday. I fished a few of my favorite docks and sea walls, just to check them, but a single drum was my only catch there. I ended up with 8 bass and 2 drum for the day, and all the rest of the fish came from rocks near deep water. It’s looking like that, plus a little crappie fishing thrown in, will be my fishing pattern for a while.

I caught another 6 pounder yesterday on a Ned rig. It was only my fourth trip using a Ned rig, and I’ve already caught two 6 pounders on one. So don’t let anyone tell you these little finesse baits won’t catch big fish. I’ve been truly impressed with them. I lost another jig to rocks yesterday. That’s two jigs lost in four fishing trips. Not bad, I’m thinking. I can definitely live with that. If you’ve ever fished any kind of jigs in rocks, you know how bad they are about getting hung up there. If the hooks don’t catch the rocks, the jig head itself gets wedged between them. But if you use a very light jig, and try to keep it just off the rocks most of the time, you don’t hang up often. And when you do, you can usually just move the boat over where the jig is hung, and get it loose. I’m making my own jigs, and the ElaZtech the Finesse TRD’s are made of is so tough, it lasts through a lot of fish caught, so a Ned rig can be a very frugal way of fishing.

Yesterday’s best bass weighed 6.04 on my digital scale, my second bass over 6 pounds on a Ned rig in just four fishing trips with them.

This 3.70 pounder was yesterday’s second best bass. I didn’t measure any of the 8 bass I caught, but I think all 8 would have made a 14 inch tournament limit. Not bad results for a tiny finesse bait in January.

I’ve been truly surprised at how many big drum I’ve caught on the Ned rig. Big drum were rare catches before I started using TRD baits, but now seem to be a regular thing. Both of yesterday’s drum were too big for me to try and hold up to take a selfie with, so I just took pics of them in the landing net.

I was throwing two different Ned rigs yesterday. Here is the one that caught the 6 pounder. I’m still tinkering with my Ned rig setup. More on that later.

The weather is supposed to turn really cold tomorrow (really cold by Texas standards), with hard freezes in the morning every day next week. That will no doubt make the bass fishing even tougher. We’ll see if there are any more winter bass to be found after that. I might have to turn to crappie for my winter fishing entertainment.

As long as I can remember, I’ve loved to fish. My entire adult life, I’ve owned a boat and made fishing trips. In 1981, I joined a bass club, and for the next 24 years, spent a considerable amount of my fishing time in bass tournaments. I was pretty competitive, at one point winning 5 straight club championships, winning Anglers of the Year with my wife Rose in a couples circuit, placing second for Anglers of the Year in a team circuit one year, winning a couple of smaller open tournaments, and taking second place in a large open tournament that awarded a new boat for first place. But bass tournament fishing is tough. You go on the assigned day, to a lake not of your choice, no matter how bad the weather or how you feel. You’re only fishing for 3 (club tournaments) or 5 (bigger or team tournaments) bass, so catching a lot of fish doesn’t matter at all, it has to be a small number of bigger black bass, in order to place well in the tournament. Fishing for big fish will make you tend to fish bigger baits, and use the heftier tackle required for them. That eventually became just too tough on my joints, cratered as they were, from all those years of heavy machine shop work. I was also feeling some burnout from all the tournament fishing, and in 2005, I gave it up, in favor of non competitive crappie fishing.

My personal best bass, 11 lbs, 9 oz., caught at Lake Fork, in a Bass Club of Fort Worth tournament, way back in my cigar smoking years, in March of 1995.

Crappie fishing has many of the same attractions as bass fishing, the strategy of figuring out where and how to catch them, finding them, and getting them to bite. And crappie are more plentiful than bass, so you can catch more of them than bass on most days, and unlike black bass, you won’t adversely affect their populations by keeping a few to eat (and they are very good eating). And crappie are small enough that light tackle is all that’s required to pursue them. It’s even easier to make your own lures, which I’ve always loved to do. And if you aren’t tournament fishing, you can pick your days, only going out when the weather isn’t too bad, and the lake isn’t too crowded. That became more of a thing when I cut my work hours in 2016, then retired in 2021. I do love crappie fishing.

My personal best crappie, 2.61 pounds, caught at Cedar Creek Lake, April 5th, 2022.

But over time, I started gravitating toward mixing in some bass fishing again, too. Rods got lighter, small spinning reels got better, small braided line improved to the point of becoming the norm for so many anglers like me, and I realized that if I just stuck to finesse fishing with light tackle for bass, I could mix that in with my crappie fishing, and have a lot of fun with it, without taxing my cratered old fart body too much. But after 15 years away from tournaments, and not keeping up with innovations and improvements in finesse baits, I knew I needed to learn and update my finesse baits. You don’t research finesse bass fishing much these days before stumbling across the Ned rig. The incredible numbers of fish caught by expert practitioners of midwest finesse fishing (the preferred name for Ned rig fishing) has caused the Ned rig to become one of the most revered finesse fishing baits ever, with so many videos and written articles to be found on it, and so many variations of baits for it. I tried it briefly, but with its exposed hook, it wasn’t really suitable for the water I was fishing (too much to snag it on), and I soon moved on, settling on the tiny child rig as my preferred bait for fishing the boat docks, brush, and other cover I was fishing. I especially loved the tiny child rig for bed fishing, and the last couple of springs, have started making trips to Lake Fork to bed fish for bass in March, April, and May.

A 7.70 pound bass caught from Lake Fork on March 13th, 2024, on a tiny child rig.

But most of my fishing time is spent on Cedar Creek Lake. I live a half mile from it and have enjoyed fishing it for many years, so it’s a natural for my normal preferred lake. I fish from one end of it to the other, but tend to spend more time on the mid lake. It’s closer to home, doesn’t get as crowded as the lower lake, and I’ve developed a pretty good collection of fishing spots (a milk run, we bass anglers like to call it) on that part of the lake. But with the lake over three and a half feet low, and much of my favorite bass cover on the bank, I recently came to the realization that I needed a good finesse bait for the more open water of the sea walls and rocky points where I was finding very finicky bass. I decided it was time to revisit the Ned rig, and research it better this time.

A Ned rig consists of a small plastic bait, rigged on a small jig (usually a mushroom head jig) with an exposed hook. Researching and learning about the Ned rig has been fascinating for me. As I mentioned, it’s one of the most revered finesse fishing baits on the planet, but there is so much bad info put out about it, even from good anglers and even pros. They would have you using a heavier jig and a bigger, heavier hook, and sometimes even a weedless hook. When you do all that, it’s no longer a Ned rig. It’s just another variation of a shaky head jig. Now granted, shaky head jigs are also good baits, but they won’t draw nearly as many bites as a Ned rig, and work better with heavier tackle than the light finesse tackle an arthritic old fart like me wants to spend a lot of time using. I couldn’t believe how often I would start watching a video or reading a written article by a Ned rig “expert”, only to find out he’s fishing a 1/4 or 3/8 oz jig 20 or 30 feet deep. That’s not a Ned rig.

I finally figured out that I needed to find written articles and videos by the bait’s namesake (Ned Kehde) to gain really valid info about it. A true Ned rig uses a small plastic bait (2 1/2″ or so is a very popular size), a really lightweight jig (usually a 1/32 or 1/16 oz) with a very small thin wire hook (usually no bigger than a size 2) on a medium light or light spinning rod and a small reel. Plastic baits made of Elaztech, rather than the usual plastisol, really work well for this rig because, (1) they are more buoyant than most other plastics, and (2) they are so stretchy and collapse so easily and completely that they interfere with hooking the fish less than any other plastic. That’s important when you’re using the preferred small thin wire hook. The less the bait interferes with the hook, the better. I’m using a Finesse TRD bait. It’s made of the preferred buoyant Elaztech. But it’s infused with salt, which lessens the buoyancy. So I’m doing what Ned Kehde does; I’m soaking the baits in warm water and stretching them out several times, to get rid of that salt and improve the buoyancy. Just fishing them will eventually do that, but the warm water and stretching takes care of it quickly.

The Ned rig I fished last Tuesday. It’s a Finesse TRD on a homemade 1/16th oz jig made with a Do-It Midwest Finesse Jig mold. I’ve since switched to a jig made with a Do-It Nose Worm Jig mold that matches the profile of the TRD better (I’d ordered that Nose Worm Jig mold before the Tuesday trip, but didn’t receive it until Wednesday).

There are a number of retrieves the experts use, but what I realized after some better research is that one of the best ways to fish it is a simple very slow swimming slack line retrieve, which is exactly like the retrieve I so often use when swimming my crappie jigs. Armed with that knowledge, and already comfortable with using that retrieve, I was suddenly confident enough to try the bait for an extended time on my more open water spots, and had immediate success with it. And with an even lighter rod than I’m using for the tiny child rig. It is plainly going to be a mainstay in my bass fishing, going forward. The retrieve I’m using is a bit hard to explain, if you’ve never used it. You reel very, very slowly. If you’re casting to visible shoreline rocks or other cover, you start your retrieve as soon as the bait lands. If not, you count it down as it sinks, then start your retrieve just before it reaches the bottom. Part of the learning curve is figuring out the rate the bait sinks at. You retrieve the bait slowly enough that you always have slack in your line (a belly in the line, we always called it). If your line is tight, you are either reeling too fast, or your jig is too heavy. But you want to keep the bait mostly off the bottom. Ticking stuff just off the bottom as you retrieve is fine, and can even trigger bites sometimes, but don’t just drag the bait on the bottom. Not only would it snag more, but the action isn’t as good either. And this is where the buoyancy of the Elaztech helps a lot. You can reel it more slowly without it sinking to the bottom. And the action of the bait isn’t as good on a tight line, so keeping a slack line is important, too. It takes some practice to perfect that retrieve, but these baits are so good, you’re still going to catch some fish while you’re working on it.

Knowing you’re going to catch some big bass occasionally, mixed in with lots of small ones, the temptation is to keep changing to a bigger, stronger hook. Don’t do it. That small, light, shorter hook is a very important part of the success of the bait. I’m cheating ever so slightly on hook size, using a size 1 thin wire hook, but I recommend against going larger than that. I’m still experimenting with a size 2 as well. I might use the size 1 on an aggressive bite, and the size 2 on the toughest of days. We’ll see where I end up. When you shop for Ned rig tackle, you’ll find lots of bigger, heavier jigs with bigger, heavier hooks. That’s because so many anglers ask for them. Tackle manufacturers are going to make whatever sells. Resist the temptation to buy the bigger jigs and bigger hooks. The smaller ones with the smaller hooks are the ones that will catch you so many fish. I can’t tell you how many forum posts I ran across where the angler had ignored Ned rig recommendations and moved to a bigger jig and hook, then posted about how he was moving on to other baits because he was no longer doing as well with the Ned rig as he was with the other baits. Well duh, I wonder why. And this is an excellent bait for frugal anglers. The Elaztech baits may seem a bit pricey, but you’ll soon learn that they far outlast any other kind of plastic, and you can catch fish after fish on each one. And the small jigs don’t need to be really expensive ones. I make my own. If you end up fishing rocks as much as I do, pay close attention to your hook point, and keep it sharp. Even though you’re mostly staying off the bottom, you’re still going to tick enough rocks (and hang up on them) to keep dulling that point.

I’m using 15 pound test braided line, with a 12 pound test fluorocarbon leader. That gives you the best of both worlds. The Seaguar Blue Label fluorocarbon leader is really invisible in the water, but very abrasion resistant. And the braid is so sensitive, it lets you feel every bite, even on a slack line. Even frugal Ned Kehde, who’s still using some 1970’s vintage reels, has made the switch to braided line with a fluorocarbon leader. It’s just too good a setup not to. There have been volumes and volumes written about this bait. I’m only a beginner with it, but what I have written will give you a better start with it than so many of those articles and videos that steer you away from a Ned rig and have you fishing a shaky head jig instead. My first day of seriously fishing it most of the day was last Tuesday. I caught 17 bass, 4 hybrid stripers, 2 drum, 2 crappie, 1 catfish, 1 buffalofish, and 1 white bass. Two of the bass were 4 pounders, and five of the non-bass fish were bigger than that. All the fish were caught in 3 to 8 feet of water. We’d had several days of warmer weather, and this time of year, that will improve the bite enough that I thought I could catch fish with my new bait. I went fishing again Thursday. It was very different conditions, 35 degrees that morning right behind a cold front. I knew fishing would be tougher, and so a good test for my new found bait. Sure enough, it was a tougher bite, especially in the morning, but I still caught 11 bass, with two more of them 4 pounders, and 8 other fish. And here I am, only just starting out with the bait. I look forward to a lot more fun days on the water with a Ned rig.

A four pounder caught on a Ned rig at Cedar Creek last Tuesday.

Since I haven’t been fossil hunting lately, and my bike rides are the short little rides my knee is restricting me to, here’s a fishing update. I stopped fishing bass tournaments in 2006, and since that time have mainly been a crappie angler. But I’ve been doing more bass fishing the last couple of years, mostly just finesse fishing to suit my aging body. I posted a while back about the new finesse worms I was making and using. On a light shaky head jig, these have worked well late spring post spawn and throughout the summer. But I haven’t had that much success with them in the winter or at spawning time, so I set out to add a new finesse bait to my bass bait arsenal.

I had tried a Ned rig last year. It’s a rig that uses a Finesse TRD bait on a mushroom head jig. I caught some fish on it, but it hangs up so much that it’s really not very practical for Cedar Creek fishing. I read about a new way to fish this same bait, called a “tiny child rig”. This involves adding a tail weight to the bait, and using a Texas rig hook. There’s no better way to test a finesse bait than to watch it and bass’ reaction to it while sight fishing on beds. Lake Fork is a great sight fishing lake that’s not a bad drive from home, so I’ve been making some trips there to test this rig. The results have been pretty spectacular. I’ve never seen as good a bass finesse bait as this. To say I had success with it at Lake Fork is an understatement. I’m looking forward to trying it on Cedar Creek.

Yesterday’s trip to Lake Fork produced three five pounders.

Here are the tiny child rigs I’ve been using. The bait on top is a Zman Finesse TRD. It’s a 2.8 inch bait made of a unique material that’s very stretchy and spongy. The bottom bait is one I’ve started making from a Do-It four inch Senko mold. I’ve been using a tougher plastic than you’d use for an actual Senko, since I want it to hold a tail weight when I glue it in. The color shown has proven to be a good fish catcher, but a perch color I’ve started making has been better for the Fork bed fishing.

Here’s the tail weight I’ve been using. I make them myself with another Do-It mold. Like all the jigs I make, I use a bismuth/tin alloy, and not lead. Most tail weights are just slender weights you stab into the tail of a worm, but these mushroom head tail weights really put the weight at the very tail of the bait, and give a better action in the water. The baits really want to stand up, and with the hook on top while they’re standing, they really hook the fish well. I’ve been using a 1/16 oz weight in these small baits.

The tiny child rig is a unique bass bait unlike anything else I’ve seen. With the hook at the top end of the bait and the weight at the bottom, these are more weedless than any bait I’ve ever used. They also seem to hook bass better than any weedless bait I’ve ever used. And I seemed to be able to catch bedding bass at Fork better than anyone around me, even following others and casting to fish they couldn’t catch. As I said, I’m looking forward to trying the bait out on Cedar Creek.

Like I’ve posted before, when I started this blog, it was mainly about my cycling, while being a lung cancer survivor. There are very few lung cancer survivors who are serious cyclists, so I thought my perspective would be unique. And I did all kinds of fun and exciting organized rides, so had cool things to post about. But after I moved to Gun Barrel City in 2013 and started just mostly doing solo rides on weekdays, my blog slowed down a lot, as blogs have a tendency to do. And trying to recover from COVID, plus adding fossil hunting and its sometimes arduous hiking as a hobby, I started riding fewer miles, and not really setting mileage goals and tracking miles any more. So even that went missing from the blog. So now, I have decided to add some fishing posts to the blog. I added a fishing category years ago when I bought a pedal kayak that much resembles a recumbent bike pedaling position, but never made many fishing posts. But now that I’m retired, I’m fishing more than ever, and having a blast at it. Fishing has been a passion my entire adult life, as well as designing and making baits. I still have lure molds I purchased in the ’70’s. I’ve done some posting about my fishing and lure making over on the Texas Fishing Forum. Maybe I’ll migrate some of that here, like I did with cycling and fossil hunting forum posts. We’ll see.

For 25 years, starting in 1981, I was a passionate bass tournament angler. I had a lot of success at the club level, only limited success above that. I quit tournament fishing in 2006. I got tired of the competition, and wanted to make my fishing less intense. And my shoulders and back were so bad, as well as the arthritis in my fingers, moving to crappie fishing seemed like something my body would tolerate much better, and that is what I did. For quite a few years, almost all my fishing was crappie fishing. But as I started working fewer hours, and finally retired this year, my back and shoulders are much better. And with the lighter equipment and gentler techniques I use these days, I’ve started bass fishing again. Many trips these days, I’ll spend some time crappie fishing as well as some time bass fishing.

And that got me updating bass lures I make, plus adding new ones. Last Friday, I got reminded of how much I’m loving the new 5″ finesse worm I’m making when I caught this bass which weighed almost six pounds.

Since the mid ’80’s, my favorite plastic worm had been a four inch ringworm in fire and ice color. As much as I loved that fire and ice color, I could never catch many fish on it with any other style worm. It took me a long time to figure out that the translucency of that worm was a large factor in that. The main body of the worm is so thin, and the ribs are also really thin, so the entire worm is very translucent. No other fire and ice lures I tried were that translucent. But my worm fishing style these days, with a shaky head jig, are more suited to a finesse worm than that old ringworm. So I knew it was time for a new worm. But fire and ice has long since fallen out of favor with fishermen, so there are absolutely no fire and ice finess worms to be found.

I finally used an Amazon gift card early this year to purchase a couple of molds, and started making my own finesse worms. The six inch Do-It finesse wom mold I bought makes a worm too thick for fire and ice to be an effective color with it. I made a few and tried them, but I also made those worms in a green pumpkin color, and that proved to be a better color for them. The other mold I bought was a five inch finesse worm called a Flirt, made by Bug Molds. That worm is really thin, and seemed to be a better candidate for fire and ice. I made the worm in both green pumpkin and fire and ice. Both caught fish, but the fire and ice REALLY caught fish. I’d found my new bass worm. Here is the worm rig I throw these days.

You can’t get a decent feel for the color by looking at that photo. Professional photos the worm manufacturers take give a better idea, but even they don’t really convey well what that worm will look like in sunlight. The worm in this photo is out of focus, but it shows how translucent my finesse worm is.

I throw that worm on a seven foot rod, a size 15 spinning reel, and 10 pound test braided line. It’s pretty much the same thing I crappie fish with, except that Mojo Bass rod is stiffer than any of my crappie rods. But like my crappie rigs, it’s a setup that easy on an old man body. The fire and ice color is laminated, purple with blue glitter on one side, and purple with red glitter on the other. My version of fire and ice isn’t laminated, it’s just purple with red and blue glitter added. With a worm this thin, I don’t think laminating is really required to get the color right.

Week before last, I bought a new truck, a brand new Ford Ranger. Now that I’m retired, a pickup seems much more of a fit for me than the Mercedes Metris cargo van I used for work. With its small tires and low ground clearance, I was always paranoid about getting stuck when I parked off road on my fishing or fossil hunting trips. I installed a hitch in the truck last Tuesday, and Friday was my first time towing the boat with it. It did great.

Friday, I spent the morning crappie fishing under a bridge. It was pretty chilly in the shade of that bridge, and when I let the boat drift out into the sun for a lunch break, I realized it was much more comfortable in the sun on that day. So I decided to spend an hour or so bass fishing. I started out throwing a crankbait. Two years ago in the fall, a crankbait did great on this lake. But Friday, I couldn’t muster a single bite on one. So I picked up the finesse worm and threw it for a bit. I caught two bass, the first one being the beauty in the photo. It was a tough day. I only caught eight keeping size crappie, and two bass. But when one of the bass looks like the one above, and three of the crappie were so big, they were plenty more than enough for a meal, and their fillets would barely fit in a pint zip lock bag, I won’t complain.

I pedaled 4 miles today, not on my bike, but in my kayak. I was on the water at the crack of 9:00, quit fishing at 1:00, and had my best crappie stringer of the year. There were lots of little fish, 13 fish that were 13 inches or over, and 3 that were over 14 inches, including this one. A fun day.