Fishing the Perfect Storm? Use the Right Tackle

Naturally, here at TackleTour, we're all about the tackle. So in our brief time with this rig, which rods and reels have we found appropriate to throw it? Well, this goes back, again, to how you actually configure your umbrella rig. We're fortunate enough to have, right in our area, one of those vanishing commodities, a neighborhood tackle shop. Properly leveraged, assuming they fish the product, the purveyors at your local tackle shops can shorten your learning curve with just about any bait or technique.

Dean Yoshizumi of Hi's Tackle Box shared with us his on the water experience with this rig.

Dean Yoshizumi and Jonah Li of Hi's Tackle Box in South San Francisco have performed extensive research on this rig, discussed rigging options with their prostaff, and more importantly, have spent time on the water perfecting their own recommendations on how to fish it. Our first stop in gearing up for this article was at Hi's Tackle Box.

Zander's combo of choice while fishing the umbrella rig, a Zombie Rod matched with a Chronarch D.

In California, our regulations allow three hooked baits on an umbrella rig. If using a five armed rig, this means two out of the five arms must have decoy baits attached (i.e. baits with no hooks). The easiest way to accomplish this is to take a jighead, cut off the hook, and then slide your swimbait body onto it. Since there's no hook to keep it in place, you might want to use some softbait or crazy glue to secure your bait to the jighead.

Spooled on his Chronarch D is hollow braid with a 20lb fluorocarbon topshot.

You can experiment to see where these decoys will be most effective, but we used 4” baits and put them on light jigheads (approx 1/8 oz) at the top of the spread. Then, at the bottom, we used the same size swimbait bodies but attached to 1/4 oz jigheads hooks intact. So we were running a total of one quarter ounce on top, and half a ounce on the bottom. This difference of one quarter ounce was enough to keep our rig upright in the water with no problems of spinning. 

Cal's choice? Enthusiast all the way... Megabass's Black Python and LIN 10 combo.

On the middle arm of our spread, Hi's suggested a five inch bait, so in order to accommodate the larger bait, we had to go up in size on the jigheads to take advantage of the larger hooks. On the middle arm, we had a three eighths ounce head with a 5/0 hook.

Spooled with 19lb Sunline Defier Mono.

The rig we performed most of our fishing experimentation with was the Swarmbrella so the total weight of our rig for casting purposes, taking into consideration the weight of the swimbait bodies too, was just over two ounces. So you see, even with relatively light jigheads, the total weight of the rig is pretty high.