PART I
So here’s the deal: bass don’t have an encyclopedic knowledge of all of the edible critters in their environment, so you don’t need to worry that much about matching the hatch.
Any bass angler who has ever caught a fish on a spinnerbait or a purple plastic worm should see the truth in that statement—neither bait looks much like any natural forage that a bass has ever eaten. Absolute proof that you don’t need to mimic something that occurs naturally is that the newish “fuzzy dice” style lures are gaining widespread popularity these days.
The fact is, these lures with tentacles of silicone jig skirt material radiating from a small chunk of plastic look like nothing an adult bass sees in its everyday environment. They look like an octopus mated with a micro cube Borg spaceship from Star Trek TV shows.
Yet bass do eat them.
Above: This little bass hit a Strike King Tumbleweed on a drop shot rig. It was the only bass the author caught on his first trip out using a dice-style lure, but he is confident these new lures will be great producers, especially on lakes that get a lot of fishing pressure. Other ways to fish this new category of lures include on a Jika rig, a free rig and with a weighted hook.
Dice lures originated in Japan’s super-pressured bass waters and swept across the Pacific to North America about three years ago. They are now gaining acceptance among bass anglers in our own pressured waters, offering bass something truly unique. While the only source for Dice used to be the Japanese manufacturer OSP, more companies, such as Strike King, are making them now, bringing the price down. The original OSP Saikoro Dice Rubber lures retailed in the U.S. for more than $20 for a pack of four, which makes the brand new Strike King Tumbleweeds seem a bargain at about $10 for a pack of four. Paying $2.50 apiece for a soft plastic still seems crazy expensive, and in our next article, we’ll show how easy they are to make at home.
The Saikoro Dice are soft plastic cubes marked with dots like real dice. Each side has four strands of living rubber sticking out. After being on the scene for a while with demand growing, bait companies are changing the body to look more like a natural critter and less cube-like.
Here’s a stupid fish theory developed by this writer about why they might work: When bass are fry, they feed on zooplankton. Check out images of zooplankton online sometime. Some of the teeny critters that baby bass eat do resemble these new lures. Maybe adult bass remember what they ate as kids. “Look, George, the little bugs grew up like we did!” Like I say, stupid fish theory.
Another possibility is that if you cast and retrieve these odd baits, they can mimic the action of an escaping crawfish. You let the die (singular of dice) settle to the bottom and give it a good pull to make it scoot upwards. The lure displaces water and the legs fold against the body. When you abruptly stop the forward momentum, the lure sinks slowly back to the bottom and the legs flare out, similar to how a crawfish flares its legs and claws when it’s flushed off the bottom. It assumes a defensive stance.
If you give bass credit for thinking about what they eat instead of simply grabbing anything wiggly and bite-sized, you have to believe the fish definitely think these things are food.
I bought a pack of Strike King Tumbleweeds and took them to what is becoming my favorite bass lake, Gourdneck in Portage. The Tumbleweeds are 12-sided instead of just six-sided like the Dice are. The Tumbleweeds appear a little more natural but still completely unlike anything in a bass’s environment. I bought the 3-inch “Floatin” version. The 3-inch designation comes from the length of the living rubber or silicone strands threaded through the orb. The Tumbleweed’s body appears to be made of fairly durable, soft plastic. I fished a single Tumbleweed for the better part of six hours. Despite numerous panfish pecks, a couple of bites that felt like they could have been bass, and ultimately catching a little perch and one bass of about 5 inches, the lure is still on the drop shot hook and ready for another session on the water. Although the Tumbleweed was in the water more than any other lure, other lures such as the 3-inch Z-Man Slim SwimZ swimbait and Strike King’s Rage Bug accounted for six other larger bass. Fishing was unusually tough for Gourdneck, however, as a cold front came through the day before. I’m still confident the Tumbleweed and other Dice-type lures will catch fish.
One reason for the confidence is my friend and fellow kayak bass tournament competitor, Cody McDaniel. He’s probably going to win our kayak league’s Angler of the Year title, and he has been having success with dice that he makes at home. He gave me a few dice he made out of jig skirts that fell apart, along with Berkley Chigger Craws, and they look great in the water.
Another reason for the confidence is my friend Tyler Brinks, a bass fishing communicator and one of the best drop shotters I know. He taught me a lot about that technique when he was visiting family in Michigan five years ago. He currently lives in Texas, having moved from Washington State and has one of the best bass-related YouTube channels I’ve seen. He thoroughly covers these new dice lures in several videos. After watching some, I’ve heated up the credit card for specialty hooks and new dice lures from other companies.
Along with drop-shotting, Tyler suggests fishing dice on Jika rigs, which attaches a free-swinging drop-shot weight to the front of the hook with these lures trailing behind. One simply drags a Jika rig along the bottom. He also says just casting them with or without a nail weight is a great presentation. They are also good lures for “free rigs,” wherein you let a free-sliding weight hit bottom and allow the semi-buoyant dice lure to slowly trail down behind the weight.
The dice phenomenon reminds me of the whole Ned rig thing when it first started. Large numbers of bass anglers resisted down-sizing their baits and swore they would never throw a Ned rig, but eventually the small, open hook presentations became hugely popular. Now, instead of just Z-Man Fishing Products promoting Ned rigs, many, many tackle companies are making small plastic lures and even calling them Ned rigs, too.
The same is happening with dice. They look crazy and unlike anything in anybody’s tackle box, and lots of bass guys and gals are slow to give them a try. But we have a whole lot more to learn and discuss about dice, and more hardcore bass anglers are starting to catch fish with them. You can bet that before long, they will be one more effective tool in most bass anglers’ arsenals.
