Flukes and soft jerkbaits
A soft plastic minnow that darts erratically and falls like an injured baitfish.
What it is
A soft plastic baitfish with a forked or split tail, usually rigged weightless on a wide gap hook so it is fully weedless. Twitch it and it darts unpredictably left and right. Stop and it glides down nose first. It is the soft plastic answer to a hard jerkbait, with a slower fall and no hooks hanging off it.
When to throw one
Schooling fish, spawning flats, grass edges, and anywhere fish are chasing bait near the surface but will not commit to something hard. Postspawn bass, seatrout over grass, false albacore on a bait ball, snook around structure.
How to fish it
Two or three twitches, then a pause, and watch the line. A weightless fluke sinks slowly and horizontally, and most of the strikes come while it is falling. In current, let it swing and only twitch enough to keep it from tumbling.
Gear that matters
An extra wide gap hook and a braid to fluorocarbon connection. The bait is soft and light, so you are relying on line watching and a long sweeping hookset rather than feeling the bite.
Adding weight to cast further. The slow horizontal fall is the whole bait, and weight kills it.
Flukes and soft jerkbaits by the numbers
- Families in the catalog
- 74
- Individual variants
- 943
- Brands represented
- 34
- Weight range
- 1/8 oz to 3 oz
- Length range
- 0.25 in to 7 in
- Most stocked color families
- Shad and Natural, Silver and Blue, White and Pearl
A family is a product line. A variant is one color and size of it, which is the level the app actually reasons about.
What the shelves carry
Shelf availability, not a recommendation. Which color is right depends on the day, and that is the part the app works out.
Flukes and soft jerkbaits with the deepest color runs
The families carrying the most individual variants in the catalog. Breadth of stock, not a ranking of which one catches more fish.
What a web page cannot know
Everything above is true of flukes and soft jerkbaits everywhere, in every month, for every angler. That is exactly the problem with it. Cobia answers the narrower question.
Those four lines need a location, a clock and your actual tackle box. No website has any of them.
Flukes and soft jerkbaits questions people actually ask
A soft plastic baitfish with a forked or split tail, usually rigged weightless on a wide gap hook so it is fully weedless. Twitch it and it darts unpredictably left and right. Stop and it glides down nose first. It is the soft plastic answer to a hard jerkbait, with a slower fall and no hooks hanging off it.
Schooling fish, spawning flats, grass edges, and anywhere fish are chasing bait near the surface but will not commit to something hard. Postspawn bass, seatrout over grass, false albacore on a bait ball, snook around structure.
Two or three twitches, then a pause, and watch the line. A weightless fluke sinks slowly and horizontally, and most of the strikes come while it is falling. In current, let it swing and only twitch enough to keep it from tumbling.
Adding weight to cast further. The slow horizontal fall is the whole bait, and weight kills it.
Know which fluke to tie on
Scan your receipts, build your box once, and Cobia ranks what you already own against the water in front of you.
Android coming soon
iPhone, iOS 17 or later. Setup takes about a minute.