When bass slide off the banks into early summer, tournament angler Matt Allen reckons the surest path to the offshore bite is pairing two lures — a wobble head and a shaky head fished one after the other. He dubs it a one-two punch, and on a lake he was seeing for the very first time, it delivered a constant stream of fish.
"One of the things I love about this time of year is that we've got bass up shallow and out deep," Allen said as he set out on his Tactical Bassin channel. He opted to go deep, backing long tapering points where shallow ground falls away into open water. "We're going to go out to the ends of some long tapering points where they roll off. See if we can find some fish grouping up offshore," he said.
The thinking comes straight from post-spawn behaviour. "You've got fish this time of year, a lot of fish that start pulling off the bank to outside structures," Allen explained. "As fish are moving offshore, they'll follow those contours and then they set up on those outermost points, those outermost drop-offs, and they'll school up pretty strong in those areas. It won't just be one or two fish. Sometimes you can find big schools."
His go-to opener is the underused wobble head — a football head pushed into a craw trailer and crawled across the bottom like a crankbait. "I love throwing the wobble head," he said. "You can cover so much water and it's so overlooked. I never see anyone throwing it ever. It blows my mind. I blast them on it." And he trusts it to weed out quality: "The wobble head is definitely aimed at the bigger fish."
Once that bite cools, the finesse shaky head takes over. "If I start catching them on the wobble head and then it stops, I pick up the shaky head and I can catch more," he said. In early summer, he argues, the combination is tough to top: "That one-two punch between the shaky head and the wobble head, it's unbelievable."
His sharpest pointer is about the shaky head retrieve. Instead of dead-dragging the worm, he shakes it while he drags — a tactic backed by countless hours of his own underwater video. "If you just dead drag them, the tail sits a lot lower," he said. "I am shaking as I drag because I feel like — well, I know from watching underwater footage that that keeps that worm up and flowing. Keeps that tail a lot higher off the bottom, and I think the fish can see it from a lot farther."
As expected, the action tailed off under a high sun. "It's been about an hour since I've had a bite, and we were getting bit consistently," Allen said, choosing to finish early rather than fight the midday slowdown. His advice for summer bass anglers was plain: locate the offshore drop-offs, trust the overlooked wobble head for the bigger bites, and keep a shaky head close to top up the catch.
