Panfish Spanking Plastic

My brother and I headed over to a small lake in Wi on Sat but discovered as the landing we forgot bait. No problem.
We caught as many panfish as we wanted. Mostly crappie with a few bull gills mixed in on nothing but tiny tube jigs. Over the last couple of years I have had the best luck with these things without using bait. Especially in shallower water. Time after time they work better than bait and I have converted more than one fishing buddy. By the way the crappie were in shallow and dominated the catch.

Suzuki,

My dad and I have always tipped our tubes with a small chunk of crawler. Minus the crawler, our bite has never been as good. Are you using the power bait tubes or plain ol’ plastic? Have you found one color or two that is dominant over the others? This year I was going to get away from the crawlers and tip with power bait bites/nuggets, but if it’s not needed, that’d be nice to know.

Those little plastic tube jigs work great for crappies….but it seems the only time they outperform live bait is during the peak of the spawn. Even then it is pretty even between the two. As far as for sunfish i havent used them much. But if they work anywhere near as well as live bait id use them just so you dont have to put a worm on every five seconds.

How you rig those little tube jigs? Do you use a bobber too?

I rig them with just a little jig 1/16, cast them out, reel them in, unhook fish , cast again. No bobber. Until this year I never used littel tubes before, and I never caught crappies like the before either. To date, and on the lakes I’ve fished, live bait never even came close to the catching power of the tubes, in fact, I’ve been out at times watch other fish areas around me, I was just pounding fish, they’d catch one here, and one there. In fact I was out fished the previous year by people tossing little jigs out there. That being said I have found times a lakes where you did need a little meat on the hook to get the hot bite. I honestly believe, fishing plastics this year has been teh biggest improvement to catching.