Creating the Perfect Trout Fishing System
I spent the day with Jeff Smith of Trout Magnet at his plant and on his favorite trout stream to learn about his system for trout fishing
I wrote a recent piece about fishing systems and why you should incorporate those to be more consistent in your fishing. I think as we go we learn to modify and perfect our own fishing systems based off of new trends in fishing, changes in fish behavior and even just changes in how we like and prefer to fish. But a few fishing systems seem to produce year after year no matter what without much change. And I got exposed to one of those recently.
Jeff Smith is the owner and CEO of Leland Lures famous for the Trout Magnet line of products. But more than that, Trout Magnet is as good a system as I have ever seen for catching fish. I consider Jeff a friend now but having not met him until about 4 months ago, I dug into his whole line for trout and got to spend a day on the water and in his shop learning about the why and how that went into perfecting his trout system.
Besides running a successful long-time tackle business, Smith has been an accomplished trout guide for an equally long time. He knows every rock and run in the Little Red River in central Arkansas and has had blue-ribbon testing grounds at his disposal between the White and Little Red to figure out a lot about trout along the way.
A LONG HISTORY
Jeff Smith and his fishing buddy Todd Gainer started Trout Magnet in the late 1990s out of their passion for catching trout. The firs decade was a bit of a local phenomenon where they showing folks on the trout streams around Arkansas and Missouri their system for catching trout consistently.
For the first decade it was a somewhat obscure beginning as word got out mostly by word of mouth and friends and guides sharing with other anglers. But the system was gaining notoriety. Over the last decade it has become synonymous with catching trout now all over the country and is widely regarded as one of the most consistent systems for catching trout.
PERFECTING THE PRESENTATION
While the duo started out trying to make the perfect marabou jig, that quickly morphed into finding a combination of balanced jighead and right proportion plastic that would fall horizontal and stay horizontal when fished. They tested dozens of iterations of plastics, colors and shapes, while simultaneously working on figuring out the perfect jighead. Paramount to the system was presenting the jig in a perfectly horizontal manner so that weary trout would think it was something alive and real just by it’s orientation.
When they started testing the trout streams were barely a cast across so they could see the lure and the trout and how they interacted through every iteration. They finally put a shad dart head in a modified almost beetle grub body and realized they had a winning combination. It was like going from 10 trout a trip to 50 in quick order. They perfected the size and diameter and got it dialed in perfectly thanks to thousands of willing trout.
“It’s crazy how we progressed from marabou then testing what were basically oversized beetle bodies and kept whittling it down to get the right narrow, balanced profile and tail action,” said Jeff Smith. “Then combining it with that shad dart head. It was crazy because if you put that Trout Magnet on a round jighead, you will catch bluegill but you won’t catch trout. That balanced head was everything to the trout. It’s crazy to see. But it is 100% fact.”
In gin clear water with pressured fish, how a lure looks is everything. If it’s tilted up or down it will not look natural to the trout. When you’re talking about non bait or unscented lures, if it moves in a way that doesn’t mimic things in the water it won’t get a sniff. So it has to be perfectly balanced throughout the retrieve to have a chance at catching trout on a consistent basis.
LOTS OF TIME ON THE WATER
Smith spent a lot of hours on the water guiding and testing until they settled on the head and plastic combo that was just so natural the fish could not say no it. Suddenly they were putting up astronomical numbers of trout. Suddenly 150 trout days were the norm.
One year he kept a log of his Trout Magnet catches and it was a staggering number of fish. Smith knew they had the perfect combination and was able to start expanding out from this with the growing success of the trout magnet system. His time of the water and ability to interact with the fish led to a lot of development, partnerships and new friendships along the way that allowed Trout Magnet to flourish and grow.
That time of the water proved the system over and over to avid anglers and the legend was written.
His time on the water also helped him develop multiple approaches to how he could fish the presentation to fit a variety of situations, locations and trout behaviors.
MULTIPLE WAYS TO FISH
I read a review of the so-called best trout baits on a website this past week (not Wired2fish). The author labeled the Trout Magnet baits as “one trick ponies” which was laughable to me.
I’ve only been fishing Trout Magnets for two years and I’ve fished them at least a half dozen different ways. I will admit that the Trout Magnet plastic is a simple design. A small, ribbed, narrow body that forks into a split tail. And for trout fishing, it should be rigged on their very Trout Magnet heads. Because this system is more about that head and plastic balance than just the plastic it holds.
But none of that means the bait is just fished one way. Yes you will catch a pile of trout if you just rig it under a Trout Magnet E-Z float and let it drift in the current. However, you can do so much more with it.
I recently spent a day with Jeff Smith and his son Lane on the Little Red River and got a crash course on trout behavior, and multiple ways to attract fish with various ways of fishing the Trout Magnet.
We started with the Trout Magnets about 6 feet below a Trout Magnet E-Z float and fishing them on 9-foot long spinning rods with 2-pound line and 2-pound fluoro leaders. We would lob cast out our offerings and drift with them in the current. Any little wiggle of the float and we were on notice. And once it dunked, we set and had a trout hooked all afternoon. It was fast and furious.
Lane took his float off opting to fish the jig without a float and doing what the Smiths call “fluttering the jig”. They would slowly reel and twitch the rod ever so slightly to cause the bait to flex its tail up and down like it was “kicking” in the current. That turned out to be a super fun way to fish as you would watch the trout come around and inspect and then take your jig down while you were watching it. We had a ball tripling up on fish multiple times.
We got into some deep runs and set our bobbers to 6 or 7 feet this time opting for a twitch and pause routine. Where we would slightly pop our float forward several inches and then let it settle again. This was simply hopping the jigs up from their deep drift to get a trout’s attention and it also yielded impressive results catching lots of quality rainbows along our float.
PUTTING THE SYSTEM TO USE
What is also nice about this system is it works for a lot of different fish outside of trout. All the trout species plus most of the panfish species. There is no telling how many different species of fish I’ve caught now on a Trout Magnet, and I’ve only been using it for 2 years compared to Jeff’s 27 years.
With a box of different color tails, some jigheads and a few floats as well as a spool of fluoro leader, you can go fish anywhere and everywhere and catch fish. It’s a heck of a trout system. The best I’ve personally seen for a variety of waters.
The jigheads are small and light so you want to keep split shot handy. Add a couple split shot to your line spread apart above the jigs to make it easier to cast and keep the jigs down in the strike zone a bit better depending on the swiftness of the current and depth you want to fish. You can drift them free or under a float. You can cast them and reel them. You can flutter them and hop them. But often the very best retrieves are just letting it float naturally with the current.
SYSTEM EXTENSIONS
Since the Trout Magnet system took off, Leland Lures has been able to expand the idea into Crappie Magnet and Panfish Magnet as well as expand the Trout Magnet line to include tiny Mini Magnet dropper baits for fly fishing, D2 hair jigs for more aggressive and bigger profile trout fishing, and even a Trout Slayer crawfish to represent the crayfish which are often prevalent in a lot of trout streams in the warmer months.
They have rounded out the original trout system into a total trout system.
The Trout Slayer has been one of my favorites in the summer for trout in the streams as well as smallmouths when I wade fish in Kentucky, Tennessee, and Arkansas. My biggest Ky trout this year came on the Trout Slayer earlier this summer.
The D2 Jig is another great extension to their trout system that I saw firsthand how deadly it was in catching aggressive trout in deeper water and heavier flows. We were aggressively hopping the jig and catching a bunch of fish on the D2 jigs in Toad-O and Peaches colors.
If you like trout fishing with spinning gear or other ultralight conventional gear, and have not tried the Trout Magnet system, you really owe it to your fishing to check it out.
Jeff is a great guy and I am glad to call him a friend. I follow him and his business with envy.
Great stuff Jason! I wonder how this system would work with smallies as well.