As a kid, I cast lures much too big for my Midwest quarry. I’d devour the contents of the “Big Three” outdoor magazines each month, with their feature fishing articles and ads showing huge fish taken by equally huge lures: massive topwaters of wood and plastic for taking pike and muskies, giant plastic worms the size of garden hose for fooling big bass, and spoons the size of soup ladles for catching trophy trout. I’d save my money to buy the oversized baits, not realizing that they were intended for oversized Florida-strain largemouths, giant lake trout and toothy trophy pike and muskies from fabled fishing waters far north.
I realize now that I was likely scaring the hell out of the bass, crappies and bluegills that occupied the over-fished, man-made waters around my midwest town. A half-ounce Jitterbug makes quite a splash in a quarter-acre, suburban water retention pond, and sends resident fish—who assume an osprey or some other huge, fish-eating creature, has landed—scurrying for cover.
I’m certain the purple, foot-long Crème worm I beat the water with one summer sent shivers down the lateral lines of bass in the pond and some respectable largemouths, and the local walleye were dwarfed by the gaudy spoons and lanky spinners I dragged from behind the family boat.
A Hit!
One day, I cast a frog-pattern Hula Popper into my favorite pond and, instead of immediately beginning the wet, raucous retrieve I knew I could generate from the flat-faced plug, I let it sit there until its considerable wake subsided. Pretty soon, a shadow emerged from beneath some nearby weeds. Barely double the length of the two-inch popper, the slender sunfish slowly finned up to the rear of the lure and, after studying the big bait for a bit, took a nip at the rear treble hook.
The hook alone was too big to fit in the fish’s mouth, but I yanked back anyway in hope of catching my first fish on a fake bait. As the lure sailed over my head before lodging in the reeds behind me, I was ecstatic that I had finally received a “hit.” It turned out to be my only one of the day, but in re-living the moment time and again later that night, I got an idea: What if I used a short length of line and tied on a smaller hook to bait and trail behind the big lure? Perhaps a fish that was attracted by the larger lure, like my sunfish, would be more inclined to try to eat something nearby more reasonable in size.
Experimental Fishing
To make a long story short, it worked. I started attaching small snelled hooks to the rear of my lures, often removing the back treble from the screw eye and replacing it with the loop of the eight-inch snelled hook. I’d bait the small aft hook with a piece of worm or minnow, or even a feathered fly—and I started catching fish. With the weight of the big lure I could still cast the rig a mile, but the small, secondary offering of the lures’ transom took most of the fish. Even the large lure got a hit a few times by bigger fish, so I figured I had invented a new fishing rig of which I was very proud.
Until I saw an article in a fishing magazine about an identical technique that had already been around for so long it had been given a name: a stinger rig.
Stingers
Since then, I’ve used stinger hooks and rigs in everything from salt water to catching short-striking mackerel and dolphin to ice fishing for fooling finicky perch. I use “stingers” while fly fishing (which fly anglers refer to as a ‘dropper’ fly), tying a tiny nymph on a short piece of tippet behind a larger wet fly or bushy, floating deer fly, and usually find the trout or sunfish has taken the smaller of the two offerings. I often add a stinger hook to worm harnesses or jig-and-crawler rigs to trick nibbling walleye, made easier by tackle companies such as Eagle Claw and Lindy that sell short-snelled stinger hook rigs complete with snubbing loops or quick-snap clips for easy rigging.
This past summer I was frustrated by not being able to catch crappies, white bass and saugeyes I was seeing beneath my pontoon boat on my fish finder as I trolled over the schools. Once I traded the rear treble hooks on a couple of Bagley crankbaits with a snelled hook, and baited it with a piece of nightcrawler or a Gulp! Minnow, I started catching fish that were attracted to the sight and vibration of the bigger lure, but ate the smaller, trailing bait.
The apps for stinger rigs are endless. Next time you’re fishing from your pontoon or deck boat, or from waders, dock or shore, for that matter, and know there are fish around, but they just aren’t fooled into eating what you offer, try adding an extra, smaller rig to trail your setup, and see if you don’t sting a few bonus fish of your own.
