KB quote: "The color I landed my fish on was 'Bubblegum' (essentially pink) and it was a 'PowerBait Tournament Strength 4" crawler' which I had cut the top inch off of." ... That's what I use most often KB. And primarily on jighooks. That's because the weight of the jig takes all the slack out of your leader/line below the float so you detect bites immediately, even the light bites. With a long leader below your weight, you will have varying degrees of slack at times in the upstream drift and on the seams, where fish often hold and bite; but not as much slack during the downstream drift and swing that Bob refered to. I also drift fish jighead worms and feathered jigs by themselves on the end of my line, and this also has less slack for quick bite detection. However, using the weight and leader method to drift fish them presents the worms in a little more natural looking way in less than the fastest water at the upper end of drifts. The Berkleys are good for that too - but handpoured worms such as Vision pink worms have a little more flexibility, thus a little more action while drifting them in moderate currents.

Hey Bob, the day last spring I came across you and Corey by the Hoh R., I later went into Forks and found a rack of Berkley 4" pink worms and took all 17 packages they had. smile I'm glad you had a good supply of those other ones.

As for color it's obvious that pink rules. Second to that I prefer the black with the small chartreuse colored tip on the end. Bob mentioned the methiolate color, which is a good one too. And I recently found a version of methiolate colored worms from Zoom brand that are a very bright cross between cerise and the red egg like methiolate of other brands, that I think is going to be more effective in colored water than the others. The first time I put one out in water with barely a couple feet of visability I caught a fish with it, a couple weeks ago.

Don't forget that real worms (the healthy nightcrawlers) not only work great for summer steelhead, they also work well at times for winters. You can rig them any of the ways suggested above for the rubber worms. I like to use a pink corky or pink yarn with them. Summer steelies and big trout love it!

RT