Up until last Saturday, a wacky rig ranked down there with 12-inch swimbaits and dough balls as a viable option for me to catch bass. To be fair, I’d never really given it a time to shine. Then again, I never really had a situation to use it. In fact, it was so low on my list of productive techniques that when one of the other editors here asked if he could have any packs of a particular brand of worm, I obliged.

Then Brian Lindberg, FLWOutdoors Magazine’s creative director, went about whupping me Saturday with the same worms rigged wacky-style. Needless to say, I wish I had my worms back.

How he rigged the worm and other techniques regarding the wacky rig will be covered in-depth in some of the upcoming issues of FLW Outdoors Magazine, so I won’t expound on them here. However, I did want to talk about one thing I found interesting while Brain went about throttling me.

Wacky rigs usually utilize a soft-plastic stick bait, and most stick baits have predominantly the same pen-like shape. However, the shape and flexibility of the worm can be much more important to the success of the rig than many may give credit. We both were using the same color, but different worms. Brian caught fish; I didn’t. The second I switched to the other type of worm, my line started getting tugged on too. This wasn’t just a fluke occurrence either. A few days after our trip, Brian went out again with a co-worker and experienced the same thing. What we noticed was how the different shapes produced different fluttering actions and different rates of fall. On a rig that doesn’t have much action to begin with, those two aspects are very key. Remember that the next time you’re not getting bit on a wacky rig. A simple switch to a different worm may be all that’s necessary.

Slam the hooks!