How to Fish a Texas Rig Around Laydowns: First Pitches and Follow-Up Casts
Jeff Kriet includes Texas-rigged plastics among his flipping choices for laydowns.1
At an unconnected tree in somewhat deeper water, Preston Clark uses a Texas-rigged straight-tail finesse worm with a 3/16-ounce sinker to work through the branches.2
Choose the laydown and its target spots
- Kriet favors a full-bodied laydown whose end reaches deeper water, giving him shallow, middle and deep cover to test.1
- He often finds fish on the slick, hard part of a laydown.1 That pattern may change when the tree has many limbs.1
- Forks and notches between major limbs are potentially productive targets in Kriet’s account.1
- He also checks broken limbs beside the main tree for possible additional opportunities.1
Work the tree: three documented starting routes
- On an unconnected tree, Clark spends about five minutes covering as much of it as he can with his Texas rig.2
- With a jig, Kevin VanDam positions his boat so the lure travels down the laydown’s trunk.2
- In a separate laydown approach, Michael Iaconelli starts at the outside and front of the tree.2 He then moves into its heart.2
- When a laydown looks promising, Kriet makes 10–12 casts on both sides from different directions.1
Adjust the Texas rig and its fall
- On notable sections of a slicked-off laydown, Jason Christie uses a Texas-rigged creature bait with a 3/8-ounce weight.3
- Kriet keeps several weights available to change the fall rate while flipping or pitching laydowns.1
Current and wind
- For a current-exposed laydown, Christie approaches from downstream and hits the top end first.3
- With wind but no current, he comes in downwind so the bait crosses the tree naturally.3
- Iaconelli also makes a couple of flips on the upcurrent side of a current-washed laydown.3
Use bites to narrow the next target
- After several bites, Bradley Roy checks whether they came from the same kind of wood.4
- He checks whether the bite depth repeats.4
- After two bites at four feet, he may test trees at two and six feet to see whether depth matters.4