It's winter and I'm reflecting on the past year's successes, failures, regrets, and so on. One that has really been stuck in the back of my mind that I've been puzzling over was a tournament I lost near the end of the season fishing a tube rigged "stupid" style. I just kept missing fish, and it seemed that those I didn't miss I managed to lose. In almost every case, the hook failed to come out of the tube on the hookset. This day in particular was bad, but I've had issues with it the other times I've fished it as well. The erratic action is awesome, keeping it weedless is even more awesome, but all the bites in the world don't matter if you don't get them in the boat!
I was using the jighead everyone is going to recommend, fishing it on an 8lb fluoro leader on 20 lb braid on a medium power fast action spinning rod. I've experimented with soft tubes, harder tubes, thinner walled and thicker walled tubes. Is this simply a technique where you just really need to lay into them to get the hook set? I've experimented with everything I could think of short of hammering them like I would on a hollow body frog bite. Is there some mistake I'm making it rigging it up? I've managed to get it to look like it's "supposed" to look - Texsposing it and skin hooking the point. Do I need to rip out some plastic around the eye of the jighead to allow it to pivot easier?
I'm absolutely baffled on this one. At this point I've just about completely written it off as a viable technique, but there are just too many people that talk about how well it works for them for me to give up on it.
Anybody had a lot of success with some tips to offer? What have I been doing wrong?