Z-Man Micro Finesse

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amso4
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Z-Man Micro Finesse

Post by amso4 » Thu Mar 02, 2023 7:15 pm

I picked up a few of these micro jig heads and a couple of the micro plastics over this winter. I have not gotten a chance to use them due to the weather. I was wondering if anyone else has had a chance to use them and provide some insight to their effectiveness and best uses. In addition, I was wondering what rod setup would work well for these tiny lightweight baits. I am thinking NRX 901 with 8lb braid and 6lb leader.

Any thoughts?

Bronzeye
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Re: Z-Man Micro Finesse

Post by Bronzeye » Sat Mar 04, 2023 1:57 pm

I can comment on early results I've had with three of these baits using lighter tackle (2 and 4 lb nylon mono, 4 lb Nanofil with leader, UL rods).

LarvaZ: Surprisingly effective for crappies, somewhat so for bluegills, on one outing. Last October, an unseasonably warm day inspired an evening outing to a lake where, to my surprise, a hatch at dusk of some kind of tiny bugs led to surface feeding by panfish. I first tried a ZMan Shad FryZ, but got blanked. They also didn't want some other UL lures I tried (including a Trout Magnet), but after I put on a green pumpkin LarvaZ, I caught fish on almost every cast until dark. A few were bluegills, but most were crappies--a surprise to me, because they had passed on minnow imitators and were instead biting a dark imitator of an insect larva.

Shad FryZ: The same lure that crappies had ignored in October was the champ, again at dusk, two weeks ago. They had refused most of the moving lures I tried, taking only scented lures suspended below a float. The Shad FryZ has a subtle tail wiggle even at a very slow retrieve, and that evening the crappies tore into it in less than a foot of water. The buoyancy of the Elaztech material made it easy to keep the lure above bottom on a slow retrieve.

StingerZ: A bit of a disappointment here. The tail is vertically flattened into a small disc near the end. Maybe one cast in every ten resulted in that disc jamming on one side of the hook as the tail wrapped around the hook bend. I caught a few panfish on it, but switched to another lure. I've seen other complaints of this problem online. I will snip the protruding parts of the disc off and try this lure again; I expect that it will be more effective that way.

All of these baits are very durable despite having thin tails. I superglued them to the back of jigheads before use.

The incidental bass I have caught on them have been micros themselves, so I wouldn't worry about being underpowered with UL tackle. (I think an NRX 901 would be overkill most of the time.) Sub-7-inch bluegills seem so far to be intimidated by the bulk of the Shad FryZ (which is fine with me), but I haven't yet used it in warm water when they are more aggressive.

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