A 7-inch YUM Dinger may look silly when you pull it out of the package, but don’t let that deter you from stringing it on a hook. To bass, these super-sized offerings look downright irresistible – and the size of the bass doesn’t seem to matter.
When the new jumbo YUM Dingers were introduced a year ago, I was eager to give them a try. Like virtually everyone else in the world of bass fishing, I had learned first-hand the incredible productivity of 3-, 4- and 5-inch Dingers. I expected the new baits to work well, but I assumed I would be sacrificing action for the sake of upping my big-fish odds.
Was I ever surprised! I indeed caught quality fish, including three that weighed more than 5 pounds in two days of experimentation. However, I also caught numbers, and a few fish were only a couple inches longer than the baits. In those two days, I worked my way though two full packages of 7-inch Dingers, catching dozens of bass of all sizes.
Interestingly, I experimented some with traditional 5-inch models on the same days and they did not produce as well as the 7-inchers, even for smaller fish. Sometimes the bass simply want a big bite.
Since those first days of experimentation, I’ve made 7-inch YUM Dingers a regular part of my bass arsenal. I’ve caught bass with them rigged whacky style, Texas rigged and Carolina rigged. Typically, however, I rig a big Dinger weightless, hooked weedless with a 5/O Excalibur Tx3 Point Wide-Gap hook.
If the bass are very aggressive, I’ll walk the dog with a YUM Dinger, using fairly large sweeps of the rod and a fast retrieve to keep the offering on or very near the top. Over grass, I’ll just reel quickly with the rod held high, so the bait slides straight across the top of the mat.
More often than not, the best way I’ve found to present a 7-inch YUM Dinger is to cast it to where the bass should be and let it fall through the water column, adding no motion. If a bass doesn’t take the bait on the initial fall, I might lift the rod with a tight line, just to let the bait fall four or five feet a second time. Then I’ll usually reel the bait quickly back in to make another cast.
The do-nothing or dead-sticking technique works great anytime bass are holding beside stumps, tree-tops, dock pilings or other specific pieces of cover. It also will draw strikes when bass are running with schools of shad but don’t want to feed on the surface, especially over the tops of humps and long main-lake points.
Finally, a dead-sticked 7-inch YUM Dinger makes an ideal follow-up bait any time a bass swipes at a topwater lure and misses it. Land a Dinger right on the spot where the fish missed and let it drop. More likely than not, the line will soon be racing sideways, signaling you to set the hook hard!