Today’s new product up for review is the Yum Money Hound. This is a soft plastic cigar shaped top water walk the dog bait. When I heard about it I couldn’t wait to get some and try them out.
Around here we do get a lot of vegetation growing all the way to the surface of the lakes in mid to late summer and finding those holes to throw a standard spook style bait with two to three trebles hanging down becomes increasingly difficult.
Not only that but since those holes can be a long way from shore you may only have sixty feet of open water to work through before you have to drag that lure through another hundred feet or so of grass and slop. Believe me, when you are cleaning your hooks on every cast for a couple of hours, you do get tired of it.
Bait Construction
Now with this new bait the problem is solved. It is completely weedless when rigged with a 5/0 Owner ewg plus hook. But I am getting ahead of myself. To begin with these lures come in two sizes, a 3 ½ inch version and a larger 4 ½ inch version. I picked up two of the smaller in the Foxy Hound and Bull Hound patterns.
These lures have large shiny eyes, nice colors and do have some weight to them. You will find a narrow, clear line on the bottom of the lure which I chose to cut with a razor blade prior to rigging them on the hook. Once that is done you will find a very clean envelope where insertion of the hook point is easy to do and keep straight and there really isn’t an enormous amount of plastic that the hook has to travel through during a strike to get a solid hook set.
This is where the EWG plus really shines with its plus sized hook gap. It provides more than enough gap for it to both travel in the belly envelope and penetrate a bass’s upper lip. So with that said, let’s go fishing.
Fishing The Money Hound
The first thing that you will notice is that this bait casts a country mile. I was using a 6 foot 10 inch medium heavy rod with a Bass Pro Shops Rick Clunn signature series baitcast reel spooled with forty pound Power Pro braided line.
My first cast with the Money Hound went well past my intended target with very little effort. This was a pleasant surprise as some of the spots I wanted to hit were right at that limit for most lures. With the Money Hound I was able to reach these spots consistently, and was again surprised how little wind resistance there was. It flies straight and lands pretty softly without submerging a great deal.
Walking the dog however, is not as automatic as it is with most of the spook style hard baits.
Walking The Dog
On my first retrieve I made the mistake of giving it the same tug that I would with a comparable hard bait. Not only did that not get the hound walking, it just pulled it straight toward me. I found that the twitches have to be both shorter and lighter with the hound but that once you get it walking, it doesn’t take much to maintain a good steady rhythm. Then once you get the hang of it, changing the cadence of the retrieve, starting and stopping and twitching it a varying amount of times, isn’t that difficult.
The Yum Money Hound looks and moves very much like a traditional hard spook style bait with the added advantage of being weedless. It does not come with internal rattles but a worm rattle can be inserted into the back without compromising the action one bit.
I really think that this lure is going to become one of my favorite for fishing over slop and only time will tell if the hook up to strike ratio is better, worse or the same as a hollow body frog. One thing that’s for sure, it does give the fish a different look and won’t exhaust your wallet or your patience by having to clean those trebles on every cast.
[cjwizard]yum money hound,3,,,,,,,,,,,[/cjwizard]