Inside Angles: Season of the Ned

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When for the Winter Issue of 2010, we asked In-Fisherman Field Editor Ned Kehde to write about the method of fishing he used during winter on Kansas reservoirs to often put 100 fish in the boat during a 4-hour outing, we had no idea the eventual affect it would have on fishing. A year later in another magazine article, Senior Editor Steve Quinn called Kehde’s jig rigging the Ned rig, and the rest is history—and part of our angling vocabulary and our repertoire on the water.

What a phenomenon. Tournament anglers use this dandy finesse rigging when conditions are tough in tournaments. Guides often hand the rigging to clients as a no-brainer jig-rig that can be cast and retrieved in many ways to produce fish—often smallmouths and largemouths, but also walleyes, and just about anything else that swims.

We have, of course, written extensively about the rigging, which Kehde himself would tell you is a nuanced form of jigworming, an almost age-old tactic in a long line of jigging approaches that are the basis for most of the finesse jigging tactics in practice today. A story for another day, but if you’re interested you might check some of Kehde’s archived writing at in-fisherman.com.

Some of the nuanced parts of Ned rigging bear repeating before I add to the mix my “Better Than a Ned Rig,” or my “Beat Rig,” so named because the rigging beats a Ned much of the time. If you’re happy fishing the Ned, stand back and hold on.

Setting the scene, it’s noteworthy that the Ned body size Kehde and crew arrived at through hundreds and hundreds of outings and thousands and thousands of caught bass was about 2.75 inches. That’s in-the-field tediously tested tough.

There is, however, also in-lab testing from Berkley scientists suggesting bass preference for a worm 4 inches long and 1/2 inch thick, as opposed to long and thin, or short and fat. The test was noted in Dr. Keith Jones’ book Knowing Bass—The Scientific Approach to Catching More Bass.

My own preference over time fishing for smallmouths was for a Berkley MaxScent 5-inch General trimmed to 3.25 inches, this before they introduced their Ned body, the MaxScent Lil’ General, which measures 2.75 inches. It remains hard to beat the scientific formulation of scent for attraction and triggering and taste to get fish to hold on.

The Lil’ General catches fish, but the point is that there isn’t one body of a specific length or thickness that’s always going to seal the deal. On the other end of that divide, it’s worth noting how deadly the 2.5-inch MaxScent Tube is rigged on a Ned head (or another light head--the mushroom design is great but not sacred) in tough-bite situations. It has a wee-bit more diameter than the standard Ned, so it glides a bit better. And the addition of a jighead adds a bit of length to the package so it measures close to 2.75 inches.

Meanwhile, you should have bodies that float as well as bodies that don’t. They perform differently. Floater bodies offer snappier, more-responsive movement as you swim your Ned along, and, of course, at rest on the bottom they instantly go tail up. The package is a flighty minnow, dithering, dancing, and darting. By contrast, a sinker body like the MaxScent Lil’ General swims and glides along more smoothly and subtly than a floater body like the Z-Man TRD. It’s a nonchalant minnow, closer to a deadsticking presentation, and when it touches down on the bottom it’s like a real goby, a real sculpin, and real baitfish in terror for it’s life. I’m not promoting one over the other, but suggesting the contrast is worthy of note and you may need to fish one against the other to see which works best given the situation.

Standard body colors are for the most part subdued: green pumpkin; black/blue; a craw-something mainly brown with perhaps a bit of red or orange; and a goby-sculpin something, usually in patterns of brown and dark green. But of course, it pays to color out of the box at times, too.

The Beat Rig

The key to the Beat rig is the Berkley PowerBait Power Swimmer body, which is what I call a grinder-style paddletail swimbait, because it works so well in slow-rolling fashion with a slow-steady retrieve interspersed with rod-tip nods and occasional kill-it-and-let-it-sink maneuvers. I’ve caught thousands of fish on various paddletail swimbait bodies, but the Power Swimmer (and presumably some other bodies like it) is unique.

Rigged on a light ballhead jig (1/8, 3/16, 1/4, and maybe as heavy as 5/16 ounce), the traditional gold-standard for jigheads, the Power Swimmer body produces a slight head-nodding action as the main body rocks and swims slightly left-right, in combination with the padding tail. But one must go beyond just saying “padding tail,” because the Power Swimmer paddler doesn’t just paddle, but swings and swags, almost circling on itself, around left, and then almost around right, sometimes skipping a beat here and there. But it’s the head nod that makes the package unique, giving it three actions instead of the regular two actions produced by most paddletail swimbaits.

I know about the swimming action of the Power Swimmer, not just from fishing it, but because as I have previously testified, the 2,500-gallon tank in our office, once used to shoot underwater photography and observe fish, has for the last decades been my lure-testing domain, satisfying my curiosity about lure performance.

You can’t just look at a lure and think you know how it’s going to perform. Nothing takes the place of seeing how lures really work, save the need to also put them in play as some point, out there on the real testing grounds among the fish. It is, however, unusual for a lure that looks good in the tank to not do well in the field.

Another observation from my tank testing is that the body material of a grinder shouldn’t be too stiff, but it also shouldn’t be too soft, especially if the material floats. For a grinder to grind, the water must flow straight down the body of the bait right past the tail to activate everything. Very soft-bodied floating grinders swim tail bent slightly up in a curve, which doesn’t look natural and the bend negates production of good grinding action.

The Power Swimmer is available in 2.8-, 3.3-, 3.8-, and 4.3-inch sizes. The Beat rig consists of either a 2.8-, 3.3-, or 3.8-inch body—similar in size to the standard Ned body—on a jighead. More specifically, the 3.3-inch body is the key body to fish when you’re also considering putting the regular 2.75-inch Ned body into play.

Once again, the “Beat rig” is so named because the rigging beats a Ned much of the time. “The Beater” adds the combination of three subtly attractive killer swimming movements to the mix. The Ned often fishes well for smallmouths and largemouths, and sometimes fishes decently for walleyes and others; but the swimming movement of The Beater makes it a standout in multispecies domain.

Of course, the Ned’s going to shine brighter sometimes—the reason to have both options in the boat (or on a bank or wading) with you. And don’t forget a contingent of hair jigs. And especially with walleyes and panfish in the mix Gulp! Minnows remain one of the most effective softbait bodies of all time. (Fish eat Gulp! for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.) But the Beat rig—The Beater—beats them all a fair share of the time.

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