Vibrating jigs have been around a few years. The Thunder Cricket has taken the world by storm, and it’s been Denny Brauer’s hottest bait the last six months. Why? It catches big fish. There’s something about this bait—the frequency, the vibration, whatever you want to call it. It attracts a lot of fish
Vibrating jigs have been around a few years. The Thunder Cricket has taken the world by storm, and it’s been Denny Brauer’s hottest bait the last six months. Why? It catches big fish. There’s something about this bait—the frequency, the vibration, whatever you want to call it. It attracts a lot of fish
The Thunder Cricket is available in 4 different sizes- 3/8, ½, 5/8 and 3/4 ounces. My favorite size is the ½ ounce. If you’re in an area where you’re fishing super shallow water, maybe the 3/8 ounce will become your favorite. There are some days the fish love the ½ ounce, and other days they like the 5/8 ounce. What’s different about the 5/8 ounce is that it hits a little harder and vibrates more strongly. When the fish are more aggressive, they want that louder vibration.
Day-to-day, the ½ ounce is perfect for me. Especially fishing over hydrilla. The neat thing about this bait is it comes through the grass pretty well. You can feather it through that grass and a lot of times when I get it through a clump of grass, I’ll just let it stop and flutter a little bit and that’s when the fish absolutely load up on it.
There are several different ways to rig it. My favorite way is to take the Rage Menace and put it on behind it as a trailer. I rig it so it’s flat, which helps it plane a little bit. You can turn it another way to make it look like a fish tail behind the blade. That Menace is a tremendous trailer to have behind. If you’re in doubt about a trailer that works perfect, try the Menace. It doesn’t overload the bait. You don’t want to do that with a vibrating jig. You don’t want a trailer that’s too big that could cut down on the vibration. You want it to sit there and vibrate freely.
There are other trailers you can use. The Rage Bug works fine as a trailer behind it, too.
When you use a paddle tail trailer like the Rage Swimmer, you can thread it on the hook and slide it past the keeper. I set it up so the boot tail is down, and as it swims the tail naturally rises and pulls the bait up. If you want it to go down and deeper instead, I rig it the opposite way so the boot tail is pushing down. Whichever way you rig it will change what the bait does in the water.
If I want smallmouth, I love to go with a green pumpkin-colored blade so it looks like a crawfish in the water. With a colored blade, you don’t have a bunch of flash like a shad. I take the Baby Rage Craw and put it behind the blade. It looks like a crawdad scooting across the water. On smallmouth waters, that combination is a killer.
If you want more subtle action, you can take the Blade Minnow, which has more shimmy action behind the blade.
When it’s the springtime, the fish are feeding on bluegill. The bluegill are up shallow, and that’s what the bass are chasing, especially during the spawn. In that scenario, you want a little chartreuse in your bait. I take a green pumpkin Thunder Cricket and pair it with a chartreuse trailer, or I’ll spray the tail of a green pumpkin trailer. To get it really bright, I spray the chartreuse color on the KVD colored bait rather than the green pumpkin color. It makes it pop.
When the fish start getting on the shad bite, you’ll want to move to white colors. The Thunder Cricket comes in many different colors, and there are endless ways you can use trailers behind it. Don’t overpower the bladed jig with too big a trailer. You want that freedom to really vibrate through the water.
How you rig the Thunder Cricket and what you rig it on will make a lot of difference. One thing people gripe about with vibrating jigs is how many fish they lose on them. Part of the reason they lose a lot of fish is because they’re not set up right, or the jig doesn’t have a sharp enough hook. With the Thunder Cricket, you know you have the right bait, so if you lose fish on it, it’s probably because you’re using the wrong rod or the wrong line setup.
For the rod, I use the Lew’s Custom Pro rod, the Magnum Flipping and Pitching model. It’s 7’4”, and it’s a bit stiffer but with a flexible tip so you can still throw and let the bait load with the fish. I’m able to drive the hook in, and I hardly lose any fish with it. If I get a little debris on it working through the grass, I can snap it because it’s stiffer and gets free of the grass easily.
The reel I use is the Lew’s HyperMag in 7.5:1 gear ratio. Line-wise, I like to use 20lbs fluorocarbon.
