How to Fish a Rattle Trap on Lake Guntersville

I often fish with people who just don’t understand that a “rattle trap” is more than just bait that you throw out and reel back. It’s my experience that working a rattletrap with various presentations is the key to catching fish.

I wanted to share with you the presentation that I believe catches the most fish and the biggest fish. I know there is various types of rattle traps out there. I really don’t care which version or manufacturer you use this presentation will work on all of them.

The key to this presentation is to understand the depth of the water and the depth of the grass on the bottom. Let me explain, if your fishing 5 feet of water and the grass is showing at about one foot high then this is how you work this bait. I call this a stop and drop method of working a rattletrap: first of all this is the type of bait you must make long casts, secondly you stop the reel or the winding if you may and let it drop. The key to this is learning two things:

Your stop and drop method is done from a parallel wind in other words keep the rod parallel with the water don’t drop the rod.

The next thing is the count down, as in the depth illustration above in 5 feet of water with one foot of grass you let it drop for a count down for 3 or maybe 4 counts. This will let the bait tick the top of the grass

One important issue in the presentation is a high-speed reel 7:1:1 preferable this will give you the fastest recovery time of the bait and allow the bait just to tick the top of the grass and recover quickly. The next most important issue here is to use braided line; you need a line when fishing over grass that has very little stretch, braided line has no stretch to it and when caught in the grass pulls through it easily.

I hope this little tip helps you catch more fish.