STICK GUARDS

I was just wondering something. I do that a lot, it's kind of a slow wet Friday here in west Alabama.
I've been reading about fishing in thick brush piles, but all my brush will be blow downs and submerged trees along the river banks and creek banks.
I wondered if I could put a stick guard on a gold hook with a minnow and be successful catching and staying weedless at the same time.
What do ya'll think?

I was wondering how to rig a weedless gold hook myself. I was fishing a super thick green cypress that blew down in creek channel the other day. I knew it was holding big crappie but couldn’t get my minnows down more than a few feet without getting hung with a gold hook. I ended up putting on a 1/8oz weedless jig head and trimming it down to about 4 bristles and dropping that down. This definitely helped with the hang ups but I feel like that bulky presentation cut down on my bites some. I was able to at least fish down in the 7-9ft range and pull some nice fish.

The "Stick Guards" I'm familiar with may not work with a plain Aberdeen hook. By design, they're made with a hole in one end that slips over the tie eye of a jig head and the other end covers the hook point. On a plain Aberdeen hook, the tie eye has no lead head to stop that end of the Stick Guard from slipping down the shank of the hook.

There are, however, weedless Aberdeen hooks (& baitholder style hooks) which have a thin wire guard built onto the hook. And there's also weedless jig heads (with various styles of weedguards).

I tried the "Stick Guards" on regular (open hook) jig heads ... and found them to have two "cons" that made me stop using them. They had a tendency to bend "inward", which made them subject to hanging up on cover, plus after a couple of uses the hook point end was so shredded that it wouldn't stay put. That sent me to commercially made weedless jig heads. And to make a long story, short ... I went from Oldham's Weedless Crappie jigs (thin wire loop guard) to a locally made weedless jig (Y guard), then when I ran out of those I had Grousefly copy them ... then several years ago I had him make them with #2 Aberdeen hooks (on both 1/32oz & 1/16oz heads), rather than the #4 Aberdeen hooks of the original batch.

I fish blowdowns and submerged trees whenever I can find them, either casting to them or Vertical Casting down in them ... using the weedless jig heads. But, I originally started using the Oldham's weedless jigs tipped with a minnow, for Smallmouth fishing on the shale rock banks & submerged wood cover of a lake in Tenn. That's where I originally started using the Stick Guards & found them to be lacking for my purposes.

I have heard of people using dental braces rubber bands to make plain Aberdeen hooks weedless, and even procured some ... I just never got around to trying them.