Cast over likely fish-holding structure and twitch the bait back toward you. Make it skip, jump, hop and dart along the way. Fight the urge to set the hook when you see the strike near the surface. First, wind to get any slack out of the system, feel the fish, and then set the hook. It is not unlike fishing a popper or topwater plug. At times this is hard to do since strikes can be vicious and heart stopping.
A Slug-Go can be fished deep off of a 3-way drift rig using either a bank sinker or one of the newer snagless sinkers like Lindy’s Snagless walking sinker, which I find is around 95 percent snag-free. This method comes in handy along dropoffs of shallow flats. Stripers will drop back into these holes when the tide bottoms out.
It’s a good idea to use a leader in front of these big baits when targeting big fish. A 3- to 4-foot leader of fluorocarbon testing 30 or 40 pounds is ideal. Though stripers do not have big, sharp teeth, they do have big scales, sharp fins, and spines along the gill plates that can easily shred lighter mono. And you can also use the shock leader to grab and land the fish.
