MASTER THE BAITCASTER! How To Skip Baits

Alright, what's going on? My name is Kyle Welcher. Thank you for watching the video. This is Kyle Welcher's daily not catch many big fish vlogs or whatever you want to call these things and today we're talking about something extremely serious. That is skipping baits around docks. So everybody has their favorite lures. Their favorite one lure, one bait. I have about 15 or 20 favorite lures and today we're talking about one of my all-time favorites. I've probably done the best internments on this one bait. A ton. Everybody has. Everybody throws it. Knows a jig catches big fish. So we're talking about skipping a jig around docks and to be honest with you, a jig is one of the hardest things to skip. Not one of the hardest, but it is a difficult thing to skip. You can skip a hornet. If you want to practice, you should start practicing your skips with horny toads, senkos, even a peg light beaver bait. It's like a beaver bait with like a quarter ounce weight skips very, very well. A lot of things skip better than a jig. A jig is actually kind of tough to skip, especially when you get up to like a half. So the jigs we're talking about today is kind of this style. You can see this is like a standard archy head. It's got a flat bottom on it. Flat bottom. It's got a super full skirt, big trailer, and a big giant hook. This is not a typical type of jig that would skip very well. The reason this is not a good jig to skip is the skirt is just too full. It's got too many strands in it. Yeah, I love the way this jig looks. It's a big full profile jig. Pre-spawn, this is an awesome, awesome jig. But if I'm going to throw this around docks when the water's clear 90% of the year, I'm going to pull a lot of those strands out of that skirt. I want to make it very, very thin and I'm going to usually downsize the trailer. Now this trailer is not going to skip very well. I've got three trailers that I throw pretty much all year and I'll show them. Basically, it's a speed crawl. One of the best trailers ever made for everything. And this thing, you can see it's got a nice thick plastic body. It's not that thick, but relative to the amount of drag, it's very, very thick, very, very symmetrical. You thread this up on your jig, this thing is going to skip like a dream. This is, if you're going to try to skip a jig, get you a bait like this or something very, very close to it and use it to skip with. So I usually pinch off right under them top arms, thread that all the way off of my jig. And I usually cut my skirt down on my jig and make it small and use a half ounce. Whenever I'm skipping around boat docks, I want that thing to skip in there and get a lot of distance because you need to be heavy as far as half ounce with a little bit of skirt and a little bit of trailer. So it really, really skips and doesn't grab on the water. And you want it to fall fast, in my opinion. So I like to skip my jig in there, let it fall fast. Usually it lets me fish it faster. Sometimes you do get more bites fishing a slower, like a three-eighths, but I try to make it fall super fast most of the time. So a speed crawl, one of the all-time go-tos for a jig, in my opinion. The next thing I throw is a net bait pack of slim. That's the best thing about not having any sponsors at all, is you can throw every single type of bait you want to throw and you can actually talk about it. So a net bait pack of slim hasn't been out for super long. I think it's been out for maybe a couple of years now, but this is a super good bait, especially in the pre-spawn. There's something about this, in the early pre-spawn, the thump these legs give off, it just, it out fishes this for big fish year after year for me. So it was a pack of chunk for a while, now I have to fish the pack of slim. It's an awesome bait. The reason I like it better is I feel like this body on it skips a little better than a pack of chunk. So this is another one that I throw a lot. It does not skip very well. And then the one that's on the jig now, this is a zoom super chunk. I keep tons of these in my boat. It does not skip very well at all. I use this more whenever I'm pitching more around lay downs and stuff. I like the fall, especially in the fall time of year or the winter, it falls really, really naturally. So I'm going to tell y'all what rod you need. And this is the same rod I use all the time for skipping a jig. So my go-to rod for skipping a jig is always a seven foot three medium heavy fast. And some brands, I prefer a seven foot three heavy fast. So I just like that extra length. I'm going to recommend that if you're new to skipping jigs, get you something in the seven foot range, maybe even the six, nine, if you're a shorter guy. To me though, when you get up, when you're throwing a jig with this kind of hook, you know, you just, I don't like having a six foot nine rod whenever that fish has got it and I'm trying to get him out of one of them docks. So I like to have a seven foot three rod, a little bit of tip to it. People overvalue tip in my opinion, all rods have a decent amount of tip. So a little bit of tip, the load and skip, and you really want your reel to be set extremely loose. So get you like a seven, a six nine to a seven three. I use a seven three. I'm a taller dude. I've been skipping for a while, but around the seven foot range is probably the sweet spot. So I'm going to tell you how to set your reel up. Okay. So people set their reels up a lot of different ways. I see people do it, you know, from, in my opinion, all the way backwards, very few people set it up exactly the way that I set my reel up, but I set all my reels, basically the same whenever they're brand new. And then I tweak it based on the age of your line, the type of line and line diameter, you're going to need to play with it a little. So basically straight out of the box, I set my reel just like this. I take the cast control knob, which is this knob right here. I back it all the way off until you can feel the spool come back and forth. So you see, I already had this one set. So listen, we'll loosen a little more. Can y'all hear that spool? You hear that spool knocking? So basically you want to get that spool to knocking and then tighten it down just to where that spool has no play left in it. So that's got a tad right there. That, I mean, you want it to be as lightly, as little bit of tension as possible to make that spool stop from knocking. So basically all this cast control knob does is it applies straight tension onto the drive shaft of the spool. So it just like tenses it down and that kills your cast in accuracy, distance, and efficiency. So basically I take that to where it just stops knocking. And I almost would like to have just a tiny amount of knock in it, but not where you can hear it like at all. From there, open up this side plate. All Shimano's have centrifugal brake systems. That's why I only throw Shimano's. So you can see it's like this. I honestly didn't even check to see how this one was set. It is one down and three brakes on. So this reel is extremely, extremely used. So it is very, very, very broken. I threw a frog on it for a while. This is not how you should set your reel because this one is going to be a little bit freer than most. I would normally out of the box, I would take your centrifugal brakes and put two down, two up. Down means the brakes are off, up means the brakes are on. And then set this dial on the side to about three. And then from there, I would play with the dial first. This is not magnetic, by the way. This has a barrel inside it that goes out into the centrifugal brakes. So I would play with this first. And if you have to move it any more than like four or five, I would take another brake and put another brake on. Or if you had to move it down to one, I would take a brake and take one off. So I would set this on three and then I would two up, two down brakes and then try to skip from there and tweak it a little as you go. So basically that's how I skip. That's how I set my reels all the time. I'm about to go pick Hunter up and we're gonna go skip some docks, get some decent footage. Might catch one after another dock. The dock bite's not been very good, so it's probably not going to happen. But basically that's the setup you need for skipping docks. I'm going to show you exactly what you need to do as far as fundamentals now. One of the most overlooked parts of skipping anything is boat positioning. I see people, they only want to talk about bait, rod, the reel. But boat positioning is what gives you the peace of mind to really have the confidence to let that bait go. And that's what it is. The biggest part, one of the biggest parts of skipping is having the confidence that your bait's going to go where you tell it to go so you never check it up and second guess yourself. So when you have your boat sitting at the perfect angle, you know, you don't want to throw where you got to throw over the console or throw over the screen. You want to be able to have your rod completely in open water. The only obstruction is going to be the surface of the water so your rod tip can get as low as possible so you can generate as much velocity as possible to skip around that dock. So whenever you are not worried about the console and the codemore, that's one less thing to worry about. It gives you more confidence that your pad is going to come off correctly. So you've got the right thing here, you've got three lines of action for your rod to do. When you just turn it loose, don't think about nothing else. Just look at your target and swing it around. Okay, so as you can see, I have another dock right here. This one has a little bit less clearance. It's going to be a little bit tougher to skip under, but it's the same exact thing. You just want to make a long, smoothing roll cast. You want to have your reel set pretty loose like I showed y'all earlier. When you let go of the bait, use your rod to feather it kind of up on top of the water. So you'll see I throw with a lot of velocity. Keep that bait going smooth. Have your reel super free so the bait doesn't rise up and you'll see you can skip around that dock. You can see how whenever I skipped it, I threw it really hard and had the rod tip low to the water. Whenever it started skipping, I picked my rod tip up. What that does is it allows, instead of getting one or two skips out of it, you pick your rod tip up and keep that bait barely skimming on the top. It kind of pulls it up and you get five or six or more skips out of it. Okay, so as you can see, we're coming straight up on the boat dock. This one's got a pretty good bit of clearance, so it shouldn't be too hard to skip under. I've got the boat pointed at the perfect angle. It's going to give my rod the maximum amount of clearance you can get on the boat because I'm away from the console and the trolling motor. You simply just do a roll cast and never look back and let it rip. The reason I went to the back side first is because I was anticipating having to move the boat out. So I went to the back side to the boat point there and now that I moved the boat out, I opened up with a perfect angle going to the front side of the dock as well. Sometimes you actually get a bite of it. So basically, whenever you don't have the luxury of good boat position, sometimes when you're in between docks, you're just a little bit too tight or you may not be under a dock, maybe pitching underhangs or something, when you got the console and the trolling motor in the way, I always resort to a pitch skip. So what I'm going to do by that is, I'm going to just make a quick, like a normal pitch, but I use a lot of velocity and a lot of accuracy and you can't get the same distance you can with a roll cast skip, but you can still pitch it under there and get it pretty far back in whatever you're trying to get into. So right here I've got the console in the way, so I'm not going to try to roll cast. I could backhand it, but I'm going to go ahead and pitch skip just for the sake of the video. So you see, it's pretty simple. You just want to pitch it, make it hit the water kind of at the front of the dock and use your rod tip the same way to kind of feather it up. So I'll do it one more time, kind of pitch it out towards the front of this dock. And you can see whenever I end it, I always end my rod tip fairly high to get the maximum amount of distance. All right, so this was the most requested video probably that I've gotten since I started YouTube and while I was trying to film this, I realized how bad of a teacher I actually am. I've never thought about how I actually skip. I've always just done it. So it's hard for me to kind of like articulate what I'm doing with my arms and body. So I was lost most of the time trying to figure out how to translate the message to y'all, but I'm definitely not a teacher. Anyways, hope the people that wanted to see something did. One thing I forgot was to tell what type of line I use. I always use fluorocarbon for skipping, except in this video, I was actually using braid because I was using my swim jig rod. The reason I was doing that because it was white and I felt that the white, your eyes could pick up on better and see the skips a little better. So that's why I was using white and I was using on 60 pound K9 nine strand braid. I should have, I shouldn't say should have, but I always skip K9 hundred percent fluorocarbon, 15 pound up to 20, depending on the water clarity and the toughness of the docks, whatever you want to call it. If I'm fishing like clear water, a bunch of floating docks without crossbars, I'll go down to 15 pound line. But that may fall a little faster, look a little bit more natural. If I'm fishing, you know, like Chickamauga wooden docks with big fish, I'm going to always throw 20. So if you liked that video, as always, leave a like, leave a comment, hit the subscribe button. I will see y'all later.