by Jason Brooks, July 29, 2016

It’s a wonderment to me how someone comes up with a lure design for fishing, especially some of the salmon and steelhead baits. Pink worms, black jigs, orange plugs, rubber hoochies, and so on makes me think that some junior college dropout drank too much beer one night with his high school buddies and soon they were playing pranks on each other while fishing the next morning. “Hey Joe, try this pink worm, trust me, steelhead will bite it…” a snicker by the helpful prankster just before Joe’s rod explodes with a huge steely.

Well, Okay, maybe that’s a bit too dramatic so in reality all of the above mentioned weird baits as well as a few others actually have something in common. They can be found not only in salmon and steelhead isles of our favorite Northwest fishing stores but also in some of the Southern states bass isles. It’s really hard for me to give credit to fisherman who target fish that don’t return to glacial silt rivers but instead fish under Uncle Ernie’s dock at the local swimming hole.

Obviously at some point a bass fisherman came to their senses and started targeting salmon and steelhead or maybe a relative invited one along and they brought their own tackle box. No matter how these lures came to our rivers they work and that is all that matters. Of course the lures were fine tuned and tweaked a bit to make them marketable to salmonoid fisherman after all I know that when I head to my tackle store I don’t head down the bass isle (maybe I should).

Plugs first come to mind when I think of bass lures being used for salmon and steelhead. Years ago, as a kid, I remember watching an episode of Fishing the West with Larry Schoenborn where he was fishing the Wind River at the deadline with the Columbia for spring Chinook. In that show they trolled a large bass plug that was a red color with a black back painted to look like a crawdad. Not too many Spring Chinook are looking for crawdads but they caught fish with the deep diving plugs. Anyone who has fished this fishery or the one in Drano Lake a few miles upriver knows that Storm Mag-Warts in Fire tiger are one of the most popular baits to use. Kind of ironic how that crawdad pattern and the fire tiger closely resemble each other and the Mag-Wart was originally designed as a bass lure.



These same bass plugs are very popular with fall Coho fisherman as well. The shallower diving standard plugs bass fisherman are known to throw into weed lines, lillypad fields and under docks are the same ones used by salmon fisherman tossing them near grassy shores, log jams and under tree branches to stacked up Coho. Why someone decided to pull one of these out front of their drift boat still baffles me, but this is one of my favorite ways to fish for winter steelhead. A small gold, silver and blue or a pink with black bill diving plug slowly backed down a seam is pure bliss, especially when others aboard have no idea how to cast or tell a bite from a bump along the bottom.

I jokingly mentioned pink worms at the beginning of this article but any die hard winter steelhead fisherman who floats rivers during the spring thaw knows how awesome this bait can be. The strike is almost unbelievable and the predisposed confidence this lure gives the fisherman is like no other bait.

Rigging them “whacky” style with the hook simply pushed through the middle of the worm is much like how a bass fisherman fishes plastic worms. A few years ago I was floating an Olympic Peninsula river two days before it closed in Mid-April fishing for steelhead. My fishing partner brought along the pink worms for us that day and as I pulled the package out of his tackle box the bag of worms said. “Gary Yamamoto” on them. This is a well known bass fishing company and they make an assortment of plastic baits including many colors of worms. I laughed and asked him why he bought bass fishing worms and he said that was the only ones he could find in the store. I tied one onto a drift leader and on my third cast I was fighting a wild steelhead. I almost felt a little guilty actually using bass tackle for such a magnificent fish but hey it worked! One thing I also learned that day was that the worms designed for bass fishing didn’t have a paddle tail and the plastic or rubber they were made out of didn’t hold up as well as my normal steelhead lures. I am sure this is one of the modifications that steelheaders have made over the years, tired of using worms not made to withstand bouncing along rivers currents and rocks and the action needed just a little more enticing.



Jigs aren’t necessarily new but are kind of like the sophomores of the lure academic world. Some guys have been floating jigs for over 20 years while others are still trying to figure it out. Twitching jigs is even fresher yet but still jigs for steelhead and salmon all started by someone who thought using them would work, after all they worked for pan fish. Speaking of twitching jigs last fall I was floating the Humptulips with a few buddies in my drift boat. One of the guys ties on a jig as we came to the “helicopter hole” already stacked with drift boats and guys twitching away. Our only place was next to shore along a small back eddy with a sunken log. I thought to myself that I was going to lose a lot of jigs that day as the only place for us to twitch was right in the logs to hiding fish. My buddy makes a cast right into the structure and begins twitching. I watch his jig bouncing off of logs and limbs and I can’t figure out why he isn’t snagging it up and losing it. When he reels in I ask to see his jig and sure enough he is using a weedless jig with a rubber skirt. I ask “What the hell is that?” and he answers that he couldn’t find any “twitching jigs” so he kept looking around the store and found the bass isle. There he located these weedless jigs with a rubber skirt and figured “Why not!” The design of a weedless jig is some fine wires that are molded into the head of the jig and extend past the point of the hook. The idea is that the wires are strong enough to protect the point of the hook yet when a fish bites they give way and the hook drives into the jaw. He hooked and landed several Coho that day and didn’t foul hook one fish or lose the jig to any structure. Now why didn’t I think of that!



The newest member of bass baits to our salmon world is a bait ironically from Density-Tackle, a company near the shores of the Puyallup River, known at bass and walleye tournaments for their “sonic minnow” molded to resemble small baitfish. Density-Tackle’s Brian Henderson and I met one day at a kid’s birthday party. We both had our boys attending the mutual friend’s party and while the kiddos yelled and screamed while working off loads of sugar laden cake and ice cream Brian and I began talking about fishing. He mentioned he likes to bass fish and though I really can’t stand bass fishing but I thought talking about fishing for anything was better than having to listen to the room of 6 year olds playing some annoying game so I chatted with him a bit. After learning about his company he gave me a package of his soft swim baits. I immediately noticed they resembled a small herring and asked him if he ever salmon fished with them. He said he had not and I began begging him to make these baits in pink.

The summer before was an odd year, meaning droves of pink salmon came back to my local rivers and I targeted them in the salt water as they passed close by points and milled around in bays. All I had were either heavy lead lures made for mooching or pink worms on jig heads for twitching. I noted how the sonic minnow tails fluttered when retrieved and knew that this motion would drive the salmon crazy. Plus to rig them all you would have to do is put them on a standard drift fishing leader, slide on an egg sinker above the swivel and cast and reel in. The baits action does all the work. My begging finally paid off and this past spring and he gave me a few packages in hot pink. Immediately my mind began racing about, not only will these baits be unreal for targeting pinks in the salt and in estuaries but also for fall Coho and winter steelhead. Once again a bass bait was tweaked just a little bit and entered the salmon and steelhead world.

Next time you head to your local tackle store look around a bit and even venture down the bass isle. You never know what you might find including the next hot lure. If not at least you will find a few items to toss into your buddies tackle box to embarrass him a bit when he goes fishing the next time. Just be careful that “Joe” doesn’t hook into the big one on your prank lure.