 Well already Thursday once again you know what that means another segment of fishing tips this team this week Ray and Mandy discuss everything you need to know about bass fishing. Today we're going to talk a little bit about bass fishing bass is the number one selected fish for anglers across the United States of America getting more and more popular in Minnesota especially with smallmouth bass becoming so important in some of our lakes malax leech lake have good numbers of smallmouth bass so we want to talk a little bit about some of the techniques that you can use and the great thing about bass fishing is when the bass are biting kids can catch them when they aren't biting even the pros can't catch them so we all know what that's all about but i'd like to talk about two techniques that are very common one of my favorites it's just using a plain old worm and they come in a variety of sizes and colors you can get them four inches long to 10 inches 11 inches and it's just on a little tiny mushroom jighead this particular technique is almost weedless it just slides through normal weed lines in the in the lake this is a very effective technique you feel a little tap you just give it a second and set the hook bang my favorite technique is to use what's called a wacky worm and wacky worms are taking a worm like this and and you try to balance it put the hook in the center of the worm and you throw it out so the worm goes down like this and days when the fish won't bite anything they just can't hard to resist latching on to a wacky worm it's a very effective technique i've got a straight shank worm hook with a worm a single worm on it and a weight up here you see this weight isn't pegged and it can slide so this is called a texas rig and unlike the wacky rig that floats down horizontally this the weight goes down and slides and the worm goes down with it then you jig it and it pops up again so it's constantly this up and down pop motion with the worm tail you know flailing in the water it's it's actually really really effective hands down my favorite technique for bassin is a texas rig caught tube so when we say the texas rig we talked about with the worm you've got the weight up here that slides freely that gives you that bouncing action i've got a four-awt wide gap hook and then the plastic on here for some reason this thing can produce bites out of a weed line off a flat um that comes in multiple different colors and obviously it mimics crayfish bass's favorite food i'm rake gildaw with an s-wall guides league and i'm mandy erick the bassin biologist if you've enjoyed this segment of lakeland news please consider making a tax deductible contribution to lakeland public television