Soft Plastic Shads and Jellyworm Lures

Plastic shads are soft-plastic fish-shaped lures, which get most of their wriggling action from their paddle tails. They're so-called after the fish of that name, which are members of the herring family, and are a popular baitfish for striped bass and other saltwater predators.

To add to the confusion, they're also known as Bunker, Pogy and Menhaden - the fish that is, not the lures.

Here in the UK they're generally used as an alternative lure to plastic muppets and fished above a pirk, particularly when wreck fishing.

They're relatively cheap to buy, which in view of their lack of long-term durability, is good news indeed.

They can be fished unweighted, or fitted with separate leadheads at which point, by my terminology anyway, they become swimbaits.

Otherwise, with no leadhead, they remain a plastic shad and must be rigged with a special cranked hooked designed for the purpose, like this one ...

Rigging a Plastic Shad

• First mark the point at which the hook should emerge from the lure's back, which must be on its centreline, then


• Insert the hook point in the nose of the lure and, in a single movement, thread the hook through the lure and out at the marked point.

If the lure is bunched or stretched along the hook shank, then you've no got it right and will have to do it again - as you would if the hook point didn't emerge on the centreline.

Rigged thus the lure can be used on a short snood where you may have otherwise used a muppet, or on a long flowing trace of a flying collar rig.

Rigging a Jellyworm

Unlike plastic shads, jellyworms sport a wriggle tail, not a paddle tail - it does the same thing though. Jellyworms need to be similarly impaled carefully on a specially cranked hook. But, as the jellyworm doesn't have sufficient body depth to conceal the hook shank, a jellyworm hook has an additional crank in it - the Z-bend hook - so the lure sits in the bend of the hook and lies along the shank of the hook.

Here's how:~

• Insert a z-bend hook in the top of the jellyworms’s head and push it through.


• Feed the lure up to the eye of the hook and turn it so that the shank lies along the underside of the lure.


• Mark the point at which the hook point should be inserted on the underside, and where it should emerge on top – a few millimetres further aft – and push the point through so that the jelly worm sits neatly in the bend of the hook.

There, job done. Just perfect for use with a flying collar rig.

To Strike, or Not To Strike

Quick answer? No!

If you do, the odds are you'll just pull the lure from the fish's mouth before he's got hold of the bit with the hook in it.

Unlike with a hard lure, the fish will still believe he's got hold of the real thing and will continue to munch away merrily until he's got all of it in his mouth - providing you give him time.

So don't strike, just carry on winding steadily and let the fish hook himself.

OK, herself maybe - there's nothing politically incorrect about me!

Artwork by Andrew Simpson