Using Floats for Bottom Fishing part2

Popping Corks

All floats, bobbers, balloons, corks, and bullets that are part of a fishing rig are designed to do the same two things. First, they are meant to position a bait or a lure in an exact spot in the water column. Floats can keep baits six inches under the surface or six inches off the bottom in 300’ of water. In this article we focus on using Popping Corks.

Popping corks have special concave tops that make a loud “Pop” in the water when they are retrieved correctly. They are especially popular (and effective) with anglers fishing shallow saltwater for a wide variety of species, but they work for amberjack in gulf waters too. They will work effectively for any fish that is looking up towards the surface. We have used them as floats with only occasional pops to attract fat largemouth bass to a shiner hanging three feet under the cork.

We never leave the house without a few in our tackle bag. Same with every serious angler we know. Many fishermen who never would use a live bait to catch a fish use them all the time with lures underneath them in place of bait.

How popping corks work.

A popping cork is connected to the leader or the line / leader connection. It can be positioned a few inches from the hooked bait or lure, or you can position it several feet above the bait. When you first cast the rig into the water and the bait gets a chance to sink, it will sit generally below the cork float. From that standpoint a popping cork is no different than a round red-and-white bobber like the one we use for the dot in our cool logo.

Split shot with popping corks.

Under ideal (relatively calm) conditions, the bait sinks and stays directly underneath the popping cork. In strong tidal flows however, the pull of the water will lift the bait and you will see it floating behind the cork. If that happens, put a little split-shot halfway down the line to the hook or even close to the hook. Use a weight only big enough to keep the bait down.

Note: There are times you will see the bait coming to the surface behind the cork. This is especially true when you’re using shrimp. Sometimes even the use of a split-shot will not keep the shrimp down because if he sees a big fish that is about to eat him, he will swim hard, so hard he will be seen popping around on the surface.

There are pre-rigged popping corks available, and corks that have clicker and beads and wires on them so you can make noise with them besides the pop. You should try to only buy corks that have a slit in them, so you do not have to tie two knots (one from the line to the cork and another from the cork to the hook). They work, but they require too much work.

  This pre-rigged and wired cork works (above), but it is a pain to tie them. We love plain weighted popping corks with only a slit that lets us quickly wrap our line around them one time and get them into the water. The ones with black sticks in them are weighted, and the ones with green sticks in them are not weighted.

                      

How to select a popping cork

The first thing you have to do is pick the right popping cork. They come in two different varieties and a range of different weights.

Weighted corks have lead or metal weights in the bottom. The un-weighted variety are lighter, but they do not cast well and do not sit upright, laying on their sides in windy conditions and not being easy to fish with. Use the weighted variety. You can find them pretty cheap. We usually buy a dozen at a time on Amazon.

                                                 

We love plain weighted popping corks with only a slit that lets us quickly wrap our line around them one time and get them into the water. A good quality popping cork is important for really driving the fish to bite. Pick one up here. 

Best baits and lures for popping corks

If you do a study, you will probably find that most anglers are using popping corks with live shrimp as their bait of choice. You can tail-hook them or you can hook them through their horns and put them behind a popping cork for trout, snook, or redfish. We have caught tarpon underneath a popping cork, and we have caught cobia on shrimp we floated underneath a popping cork to catch redfish with. All fish love shrimp and popping corks attract fish to them. A lot of anglers use corks to know if they (finally) got a fish to hit; we use popping corks as fish attractors. Since the shrimp is the food and smell source, the pop attracts fish and they discover the shrimp.

Popping corks work great with other baits besides the popular live shrimp. They work great as noise attractors for both redfish and snook, in addition to the speckled trout most often targeted with the rig. They work well when you are fishing with pinfish for redfish, scaled sardines for snook, or threadfin herring for tarpon. The more you use them and the more fish you catch on the other end of the pop, the more you will agree with us. We love them and feel that using them properly makes us better at catching fish. Grab a dozen today and go catch some popping, hopping and hungry gamefish!