The story behind wacky worms goes something like this. A group of Japanese tourists visited one of the famous southern lakes and rented a boat and some fishing tackle. With the language difference, they ended up with a couple of packets of plastic worms as the recommended bait and no instruction of how to fish them. With everything in place, they disappeared around the bend.

       In a few hours, they returned. As they approached the fishing docks, all the local bass experts started chuckling because of the way the Japanese tourists had rigged their worms. They basically just poked the hook through the sex collar at the middle of the worm, so the worm just kind of hung from the hook. Now the chuckling continued until the boat pulled up to the dock to reveal a few limits of big bass. So, today we rig worms the same way and call it a wacky worm.

       With a wacky worm rig, you cast or flip or pitch to the spot you think bass are holding. Then you let the worm fall to the bottom. With the worm on the bottom, you twitch it every once in a while by moving the rod tip, maybe move it 4 to 8 inches. When you pull on the worm with the line, the worm will bend in half at the hook. When you stop pulling, the worm ends will spring back.

       By twitching the worm this way, you give it a more natural motion than with a Texas rig or a Carolina rig. If you think about it, worms twist and turn when submerged, they don't swim along in a straight line. An improvement over the basic wacky worm rig is to add a weight to the worm. This is typically done by inserting a short nail into the head end of the worm.

       This will help the worm get to the bottom quicker and will also add a different ripple to the motion of the worm as it wackies along the bottom. When you can't get the bass to hit a Texas rig, try a wacky rig. Often that is just the ticket. Keep in mind, the hook is exposed so it isn't a weedless rig.