For the past few years I.ve been playing around with diving bill placement..(I've even placed them near the tail of a bait,,you get a cool top water wobble!)..The past year I've been playing around with a new bait concept that is 180 degrees of what we are use too...We all build floating baits that dive when retrieved..What about a sinking bait that swims to the surface when retrieved?
Think about the uses of such a bait..Think how you could swim it and follow the contour of a subsurface hump in the water....of follow the top of a submurged grass line?..Another use is you can actually make your bait look like a small bait fish feeding on the surface..Or let your bait sink through a school of fish then swim it up through them...What other uses can you see?
This can be achieved by building a sinking bait then attatching the "rising bill" in one of two ways...You'll notice the one bait has the bill coming out of it's forehead facing forward at approx. 45 degrees (we will call it forehead bait) and the other has the bill in the normal location but facing back word at about 45 degrees.Now both baits will swim and wobble to the surface and when you stop the retrieve they sink..Even with in these two baits you have a couple different uses from one to another....Example with the forhead bait you can swim it to the surface and use the very top of the bill to cause a surface commotion while the entire bait stays in full view under water.....The other bait makes a great bait that you can buzz right on the surface..Like I said before you can make both of them look just like a little fish feeding on the surface by bring them to the surface and stop/starting your retrieve.
I've even tried this concept with Shad baits,Trout shaped baits..etc and they all work.
I'm sure I've worked with this project for so long that I'm missing some uses that are right in front of me...What have I missed?...Have fun with it...Nathan