From Bassin' Magazine
Iaconelli's Unique Bag Of Tricks

Gaining An Edge

Story By Vic Attardo

There’s no doubt that Mike Iaconelli helped bring a new style to the showmanship of professional bass angling. But you don’t get to step on stage without first having the skills and the knowledge that others only dream of possessing.

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If there is an aspect of Iaconelli’s game that keeps him in the upper rung of the pro circuit, it’s his willingness to innovate. In the simplest terms, the cagey angler looks around at what others are doing and asks himself what he could do different.
Iaconelli’s thinking is that bass have seen it all before, so to be successful, he better offer them something special. This premise pushes him to constantly refine his techniques and to add to his already existing bag of tricks — a bag heavier and deeper than a pillowcase full of lead or tungsten.
Here are some of Iaconelli’s recent tactics that he has used to pull a rabbit from his hat.

Swimbaits
One of Iaconelli’s latest tricks concerns his use of swimbaits. The swimbait phenomenon, which began in the West a few years ago and then spread to the South and East, is a lure type now touted by many pros.
“It is a new style of fishing for most of the country,” Iaconelli notes.
According to the former Bassmaster Classic winner, swimbaits have two main features.
“They have an extremely lifelike look,” he says. “They’re highly realistic with colorful eyes, body tones and even noticeable scales. And their size and proportion mimic baitfish perfectly. Another factor is their action. There’s no other bait that has a tail flicker and the body roll of a swimbait. You cannot get those actions mixed together in any other bait.”
Iaconelli has two tips regarding the swimbait. The first concerns rigging, while the second involves where to employ the bait. He has been using a new Berkley swimbait called the Hollow Body. The bait was introduced at the recent Bassmaster Classic. Iaconelli takes the Hollow Body and rigs it Texas-style with a front weight.
“Without a weight, the bait is retrieved from near the surface to about 10 feet down, but by rigging it Texas-style with a 1⁄16- to a 1⁄4-ounce bullet weight, you can control the depth of the bait, make it go deeper and retrieve it in many ways,” he says.
Iaconelli also uses swimbaits without a weight as skip baits, pitching them under docks. He says the swimbaits skip along very nicely.
Another swimbait-like lure Iaconelli favors is the Manic Shad. This bait is an over-molded bait with a hard head, replaceable soft body and a paddle tail.
The trick to fishing the Manic Shad is switching the soft body. Swimbaits come with minnow-shaped bodies in which the dorsal area of the bait stands vertically, as it would in a natural baitfish, and the belly on the bottom. However, Iaconelli replaces the minnow shape with a creature bait like the Beast. This gives him a hard minnow head of a swimbait with an incongruous creature bait behind.
“Normally, when you rig the Beast, you rig it Texas-style and flat (vertically),” Iaconelli says. “Now with a swimbait head, you rig it sideways and it becomes the exact shape of a baitfish but with more appendages and movement.”

Creature Baits
Creature baits, those weird soft oddities that would make great monsters in a movie, are more versatile than many anglers think.
“Using creature baits from the surface to the bottom is a sub-compartment in my bag of tricks,” Iaconelli notes. “Many anglers just Texas-rig them, but I like to use them at different depths.”
To achieve varying depths, Iaconelli rigs the bait in a host of ways. One of his favorite styles makes a creature work as a topwater bait. Typically using the Berkley Beast or the Power Hawg, he rigs the bait with a hook and no weight.
“Working it like this across the surface is an awesome technique,” Iaconelli notes.
The rigging gives him a couple of advantages. With light spinning equipment, Iaconelli can make super-long casts. Around shallow water, he can keep his distance and not disturb the fish. In addition, the appendages that constitute a creature bait produce a lot of action, sometimes gurgling the surface and creating bubbles and a thin foam. All of this presents a look that bass don’t regularly see.
Iaconelli’s next rigging technique gets the bait to another level — “the middle zone.” For this tactic, he employs a small jighead, the appropriately named “Ikey” jighead. For this middle-of-the-road approach, the preferred jig weight is 1⁄8 ounce. With this rig, Iaconelli can swim the creature bait with a steady or jerky retrieve. It’s another tactic that is not heavily practiced.
“This is just great for suspended fish,” he says. “I use it for fish that are under docks, under the Styrofoam floats of docks, places like that.”
To employ this technique, Iaconelli works with a spinning rod and light line. He casts under docks, skipping the bait to reach the dock’s farthest recesses, then retrieves the jighead/creature bait as you would a spinnerbait or any mid-level lure. The difference between other baits and the jighead/creature bait is that the latter has a tremendous gliding action.
“As it moves, it spreads water, but it’s still subtle,” Iaconelli says. “The action is on the bait not in the disturbance, so fish holding in the shade of a dock aren’t spooked by it.”
The third level at which Iaconelli uses a creature bait is on the bottom, in this case around heavy surface weeds. Not long ago, anglers began to “punch the mats,” using substantial 1-ounce weights to get their soft plastics to the bottom. Most mat-punching is still done with 3-inch crayfish imitations.
“In many places, bass have gotten so used to seeing little crayfish come at them that they ignore it,” Iaconelli says. “Using a creature bait to get to the bottom under matted weeds is something different.”
But there’s a little more trick to this technique. If you have ever worked a large creature bait in heavy slop, you soon realized the appendages hang on the stems and stalks. Having to remove bits of green with every cast, anglers often give up and take off the creature baits. However, Iaconelli believes that anglers are removing the wrong thing from their hooks. Instead of ditching the creature bait in its entirety, he rips off some of the side appendages.
“This gives the bait a slimmer profile,” he says. “You still have the science-fiction-type tails, but it doesn’t hang up on the grass as badly, and you get great movement from the appendages you leave on.”
Unlike the topwater and mid-level use of creature baits, this is not a finesse technique with spinning equipment. To punch the mats, Iaconelli uses a big 1-ounce weight and regular casting equipment.

Finesse Skipping
In finesse skipping, Iaconelli’s trick is also in the rigging. Again, the idea is to show bass something they don’t see every day. Many anglers pitching plastics just use heavy weights, but sometimes bass are line shy or get tired of big baits.
“It usually has something to do with water color or the lack of color in the water,” he says. “The clearer the water, the more skittish they are.”
To get pressured dock-holding bass to bite, Iaconelli dumps the heavy weight and uses a lightweight bait. He also chunks the large-diameter line, which is what most anglers use around docks to negate abrasion. When confronting this type of heavy pressure situation, he launches a lightweight bait like the Berkley Jerk Shad and uses a thin-diameter line in 6- or 8-pound test.
“The problem with using such light lines is the break-offs,” Iaconelli says. “When I first started skipping baits under docks with light line, I lost a lot of fish to the razor’s edge of the dock. My cure was to ax the mono and go with a braided line as the main line. But braid can be visible in clear water, so I added a fluorocarbon leader. Now I had a tough main line for the sharp edges — a braid with an 8-pound test diameter but 20-pound strength — and an invisible leader that fools fish in clear water.”
The added particulars of this trick include a 12-inch shank of fluorocarbon in front of the braided line, in this case Berkley FireLine. Often, Iaconelli ties a Jerk Shad to the fluorocarbon. The connection from the braid to the fluorocarbon is made with a small barrel swivel, which is safer than a knot.
“When you’re calling the bass, the line directly in front of the bait is the tough-to-see fluorocarbon, but the line rubbing against the dock when you fight the fish is the abrasion-resistant FireLine,” Iaconelli explains. “You get the best of both worlds.”
When fishing docks in stained or murky water, Iaconelli forgoes the fluorocarbon leader and ties the bait directly to the braid. The fluorocarbon is a nod to pressured fish in clear water.
There is another advantage to using a nearly weightless rig and finesse spinning equipment when fishing docks in tough conditions.
“When you pitch with a baitcaster and heavy weight, the bait lands directly at the target, but with spinning gear and either no weight or something less than a 1⁄4 ounce, you get more momentum and a slide,” Iaconelli says. “The bait doesn’t land at the first splash but continues on farther under the dock.”
He also believes that the noise of the plastic slightly skipping on the surface sounds like a baitfish trying to escape. This little bit of noise, as opposed to an unnatural splash with a big weight, can attract bass.
When it comes to bait selection for skip-pitching, Iaconelli prefers “flatter” baits such as tubes, shads and the Beast.
Of course, the way Iaconelli fishes, it won’t be long before he has a whole new bag of tricks. However, these latest tactics should help you catch bass for many seasons to come.






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