My fishing roots go back to freshwater bass fishing with my brother Spencer where we would fish the ponds on our farm and those of our neighbors. The artificial baits that we found produced the best results were always plastics, specifically jerk baits like Slug-gos, plastic lizards, purple Berkley Power Bait were ous plastic of choice, and also purple worms with a curly tail.

Through all the years I have rigged plastics every which way, but a few common techniques have worked consistently. When fishing shallow and pitching weed lines we liked to rig our plastic weightless and weed-less. The picture to the right is a good depiction of how we would do it. One thing to note when you rig the plastics like this is that you want to make sure there is enough slack in the front part of the bait that when you set the hook the hook will come through the plastic. But you need to make sure that while you have enough slack that the bait is also straight or it will not swim correctly.

 
The second way (picture below) we have had success is using a freshwater hook with the weight on the bottom of the shank. The advantage of using this type of hook is that it has a plastic/worm holding pin like shank to hold the worm. This eliminates the need to thread the plastic up through the hook shank. But, you still have to make sure there is enough slack to allow the hook to protrude through the plastic when setting the hook.  This set up also keeps your bait to stay relatively parallel to the bottom when reeling as opposed to a jig head that we will discuss next that gives more of a jigging/diving action. When we ever used this type of hook we usually fished a worm with a twist tail n the end and used it to cover a lot of ground looking for fish. It also allows an angler that is not that experienced in fish a plastic or jerk bait to be able to just slow reel the bait.

My favorite way to rig a jerk/plastic bait has always been to use a jig head style hook (see picture). It is not the easiest to rig up because you have to thread the bait down the hook. With this set up it is imperative that the bait be straight, if it is not it will not swim correctly and generally the fish will not eat it. This rig allows you to cover all parts of the water columns and allows for a diving like action that very closely resembles a wounded bait fish.

In recent years saltwater anglers have started using plastic for many species such as rockfish, redfish, and snook. The rigging styles are very similar, though most saltwater anglers prefer the jig head style hooks because of the need to get down into deeper water columns. I just briefly mention this, but will leave rigging and how it applies to saltwater for another article.