Split-Shotting: The Forgotten Finesse?
Mar. 3, 2008
The split-shot rig was a favorite for decades, but quickly gave way to shakey head rigs and the ever-so-popular drop-shot as soon as they began to catch on. But is split-shotting gone forever? I think not.
Setting up a split-shot rig is easy. Just pinch a #4 split-shot on 6- to 8-pound-test line (about 18 inches up from your Robo Worm) and you are in business. This is finesse Carolina rig fishing and very productive.
I got to thinking about this technique again after I got a good whipping by a five year-old last summer. Some friends came up to Lake Oroville and we went out on a houseboat. Scot wanted to take his five year old son, Parker, out to catch some fish. The area we had tied up in had a lot of rock and I knew Parker would be snagged up frequently, so I mentioned split-shotting. I had a bunch of cool little 4-inch curl tail Robo Worms with me, so I gave Scot a couple of packages and off they went. Two hours later they were back and the stories were big. Parker had given Scot a good whipping. The kid had caught many more fish than his dad, and many of them were in the 2 ½ to 3 pound range.
The significance of this was that he had caught all those fish in about two hours and he 
probably had a fourteen pound limit. Remember that this was during summer on Lake Oroville where twelve pounds had been winning every tournament for the last month and a half.
Could a five year-old really catch a tournament winning weight in two hours? I had to see this for myself, so we grabbed some gear and went back out. I was using a hologram shad 6-inch Robo Worm on a 3/16-ounce darthead, and Scot was throwing a darthead with an oxblood Robo. Little Parker stuck to fishing a split-shot rig with a four-inch curl-tail hologram shad.
Fishing alongside this kid brought back many memories of starting my son, Richard, fishing back when he was four or five years old. I used to run the boat to keep his bait in the strike zone and let him sit in a chair and drag a split-shot behind the boat. Rich always caught a lot of fish.
Rich and I were pre-fishing one time prior to a big draw event, one where an Angler of the Year title was on the line. Rich caught so many fish -- and big fish at that -- that I resorted to split-shotting during the pro event. Let’s just say that I easily won the event as well as my Angler of the Year title. The victory was achieved by duplicating what a five year-old had been doing for two days, completely whipping me and everyone else on the lake.
After that, split-shotting played a huge part in tournament fishing for me any time it got tough. It saved me several times and I actually won several events with this “finesse Carolina rig”.
Now, back to fishing with Scot and Parker. Scot and I were fishing off the front deck, leaving Parker in the back seat to drag his split-shot. We fished for a couple of hours, during which Scot and I caught a combined total of twenty-two fish. Parker, meanwhile, caught sixteen – including the five biggest ones. This is a five-year-old kid fishing behind two professional anglers, and he just whipped us! That’s split-shotting, the forgotten finesse.
The trouble with bass fishermen is that when something new comes out, we jump on it, we have success, and we build confidence in the new technique. But in many cases we move away from the techniques and the styles that we’ve used successfully in the past. All of us are guilty of it, but it only takes one good whipping by a five year-old to get you back on track. I started throwing a split-shot around this past fall like I used to, and you know what? They still eat it awfully well.
The next time you hit some tough fishing conditions or you just want to catch more fish, remember the forgotten technique of split-shotting.