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.
