The Presentation I Call Dusting

As the title implies I am going to be talking about a soft plastic lure presentation I call dusting. It requires very little experience and no special skills; it does however require your attention and concentration. Now, before I go any further, anybody who knows me probably already knows that I am pretty much a diehard jerkbait/rattail plastic type of angler. I love to be able to break up my retrieve and the action that I place on these types of lures as this is what “sells” them to the fish. Basically, what I’m seeing in my mind’s eye I am creating with my rod. Predators are triggered by such actions and react in aggressive mode.

I am often reminded of a video I saw many years ago of a young cheetah that stumbled on a newborn gazelle. The gazelle was struggling to learn to stand and walk, and the cheetah was intrigued by this. The cheetah played with the gazelle as it stumbled and fell, pawing it and even licking it from time to time. They seemingly played for an hour or more according to the narrator. The gazelle displayed no fear of the cheetah; likewise, the cheetah showed no sign of aggression toward the gazelle.

Upon gaining enough strength to begin to run at one point, the gazelle broke into a short burst and instinctively the cheetah ran it down and grabbed it by the throat, killing it. Instinct kicked in when the cheetah saw the gazelle’s action as a reaction to her presence. A prime example of what I am seeing I am creating – so to speak. As humans, no other predator can take our place. We are at the top of the predatory hierarchy.

I think before I go any farther I need to talk about the type of rods that I prefer to use. I am of the school that would encourage you to spend 75% of your tackle budget on a rod and 25% on a reel. There are enough reels out there in the $150 price range that’ll cast far enough and with a smooth enough drag to get the job done. I personally use the Shimano Metanium DC 70XG and the Shimano SLX 70 HG. One is $500 and the other is $150, but I’ve had good luck with both. And, just so you know, I have no reel sponsor.

As far as gear ratios, I like reels with either the quick 7.3:1 or 8.1:1 ratio. It is not so much for general retrieval speeds but for quick line gather when a big fish takes the lure and kicks in the afterburner once she realizes she is hooked. Large trout are notorious for knocking slack in your line and then swimming at warp speed right at you. You must be able to gather enough line, quickly enough, to avoid losing contact with the fish. Survive this run and three-quarters of the battle is over.

I use Suffix 832 8x30 braid as my main line and attach about 40-inches of 20-pound Osprey Premium Mono as my leader. Mono provides the stretch I want with the amount of drag I prefer to use, which is a lot compared to many. The combination of a heavy hookset against a heavy drag, a fast action medium power rod, and high-speed gear ratio reel, along with the stretch of a mono leader tilts the odds of success in our favor with a big fish.

Now for my personal rod choice – let me first say there are lots of high-quality rods on the market today – Waterloo, Sarge, and Laguna, just to name a few. I prefer the custom Henri Rods by Steve Henriksen. I have a long-standing relationship with Steve and he understands what we need in a soft plastic or tail rod, and these qualities are aggressively fast action with super high-modulus strength. The higher the modulus (rated in tons) the lighter and more responsive the rod can be without sacrificing strength.

I prefer a 6’6” medium-light fast action rod for soft plastics. Always remember that we cannot catch what we cannot feel, and that’s where the sensitivity of high-modulus graphite really comes into play. I typically present my soft plastic baits more aggressively than most anglers in the belief that aggressive presentations draw more instinctive bites…remember the cheetah!

So, an aggressive presentation is right much of the time, but anybody who has been around the block a few times knows that fish typically feed aggressively for only a couple of hours during any given day. However, having this knowledge does us little good if we do not know how to work with it.

The best way for me to describe the dusting technique that I employ during tough periods is to talk you through it like I do with clients when the opportunity presents itself. Yesterday I had a group of good women anglers. We started our day with an early morning moonset minor feeding period. Winds that have been extremely strong over the past two weeks allowed for a friendlier morning in the wind velocity department, so we opted to fish some windward grass bars and spoils. Bait was plentiful and trout to four pounds were caught in the brief hour of fishing that the minor provided. As the noon hour approached we found ourselves along a stretch of outside beach where we had a distinct edge along the gradual drop-off with submerged grassy points and scattered individual grass beds.

As we moved slowly along I could see small mullet moving in and out of the grass edges. This told me that food was present and holding tight to the structure, which is often a signal that predators are also present, and also holding tight to the structure.

In between feeding periods it is common that trout will pull off the shallow water and stage in slightly deeper and darker water, which is natural as they are mostly resting when they are not feeding. So, I eased the group down the shoreline, inshore of an underwater grass point that ran out to about four feet of water, before reaching the secondary drop-off. This is where the dusting technique comes into play.

Now I want you to understand that I totally believed that the trout that fed earlier in the day were staging in and around the grass on the underwater point. Long casts offshore to that submerged grass allows us to let the lure fall to the bottom. Don’t click your reel into gear, let it fall in free spool. Clicking the reel in gear will change the angle of descent, which could mean the lure will land short of the grassy target area. Once on the bottom, I hold the rod straight up and begin a very slow vibrating of the rod tip. I don’t want full rod movement with this action, just the tip, and really not much of that. This allows the lure to lightly dust the bottom as it nears the grass.

Tickling the grass is a good thing and if there are trout present, they’ll take it. Not because they are hungry but because it is easy and requires little to no effort on their part. Low cost with high gains, I’m thinking. As I dusted the lure into the grass there was the slightest little tick on the line. “That’s her,” I said. Several turns of the 8.1:1 gear ratio reel and the rod loads towards the take. Hookset is followed by white water frothing the surface. Grins all around and that little laugh that I have when things are the best they can be. Over about an hour we caught trout after trout, some to nearly four pounds.

We never moved our feet, just planted them and concentrated on working the lure properly since this was a new presentation for the girls. Another important thing to always consider is that if we had been fishing with live bait, croaker perhaps, would we have lifted the Power Pole after that first trout or would we rebait and throw right back to the same area?

Smart money would bet that you would rebait and throw back in the same area. Lure fishing is no different. Knowing this, understand that the fish don’t know that the lure is not real until they put it in their mouth. I hope you can gain some useful information from this article. Maybe I will see some of you around the docks or on the water.

May Your Fishing Always Be Catching! -Guide, Jay Watkins