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Norman, OK – When you come right down to it, the average fan of professional bass fisherman cares more about the tools the anglers used to catch their fish than about the "hows, wheres and whys" of the winning stringers.
Chief among those tools are the lures at the end of their lines. We all know that there's no magic bait, but we still cling to the idea that a novel color or some other unique attribute can be the difference between 20 pound limits and a blank.
Sometimes the pros prove us right – those occasions when they come up with something new, like the Basstrix, or something old school like an Aaron Martens horsey head. But there are other times when they go back to basics – a simple worm or jig, or perhaps a basic Rat-L-Trap – and prove that they could kick the average angler's butt with any cut-out bin bait you gave them.
With that said, the 2007 Bassmaster Elite Series had certain recurring themes in terms of lures, both old and new. Here are our top 6 – get 'em into your arsenal or you'll get left behind.
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The Swimbait
Until last year, the swimbait was just an oddity, an oversized hunk of wood or plastic used by a few western trophy freakish bass. It certainly wasn't considered something that could be used as a primary tool to win an Elite Series event.
But with Amistad, the Delta and Clear Lake leading off the schedule, all 108 pros had a few in the boat when the year started. They might not have known which ones would work or exactly where they'd excel, but there was a palpable feeling that sometime, somewhere, this was going to be the winning deal.
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It wasn't Amistad, where Ike and others had a head-banging good time with tilapia imitators. It wasn't at the Delta, where flipping and lipless crankbaits produced a huge number of bass, despite Aaron Martens' spinning rod exploits. Instead, the breakthrough came at Clear Lake, where Steve Kennedy averaged six pounds a fish over four days with a Huddleston and a Basstrix Paddletail minnow.
Kennedy was on a mission that led him to spend three thousand bucks on what were formerly just curiosities. He parlayed that $3K into a hundred large and the swimbait makers thank him not only for his own business, but for the craze he set in motion. The Basstrix frenzy was similar to last year's Chatterbait stampede, with the baits going for upwards of a hundred dollars on Ebay and anglers raiding tackle stores like soccer moms chasing twenty nine dollar DVD players at Wal-Mart. The bite was addictive – Kennedy was last seen on TV catching bass on the Basstrix in New York and you can bet a lot of the pros will spend their offseason refining the technique in anticipation of another trip to Amistad and the inaugural event on Falcon.
The Football Head Jig
Derek Remitz must not have gotten the memo – rookies aren't supposed to win their first Elite Series event. Additionally, the game at Amistad was supposed to be inward looking, with eyes focused on fish migrating to the shallow to spawn, and there's Derek, sitting on a break where the shallow side was substantially deeper than where most of the other anglers were fishing, and when he pulled the jig off the edge, it might as well have been falling into some saltwater abyss. Eighty feet of water? Are you fishing for halibut or bass? Apparently he knew something everyone else didn't because he was the one who drove to California with a six figure paycheck in his wallet.
Do you think Omega Tackle was happy they took a flyer on the soft-spoken Minnesota native? One tournament, and they probably earned the price of the wrap back in TV exposure alone.
A short while later the pros were at Clarks Hills, where outsized topwaters like Cordell's Pencil Popper were supposed to be the ticket to success, and there's easygoing Mike McClelland pulling his Jewel football jig along points, through brush and into a winning catch. We'd gotten an inkling of just how good he was at this last year when he lapped the field with it at Grand Lake, but that was supposed to be a tough tournament. This one was supposed to be a slugfest and you don't win that type of derby fishing slow….or do you? |
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The mail must be just as unreliable at Casey Ashley's house as it is at Remitz's, because the unflappable singer/angler didn't get the memo about rookies not winning, either. At Smith Mountain Lake, where the fishing was supposed to be super-tough, he averaged nearly 15 pounds a day. A lot of that came by fishing docks with a finesse worm, like many of the other competitors, but a lot of key fish came on a Jewel jig, dragged super-slow through rockpiles off points.
And don't forget Timmy Horton's pizza-eating early departure dominance at Champlain. He used a Booyah football jig on his magic rockpile to absolutely crush the field.
The Crankbait
The world's fastest fisherman, Kevin Van Dam, is bringing sexy back. Sexy Shad, that is. With two wins on a Strike King crankbait in the then-unavailable Sexy Shad pattern, his cranking stick put a lot of money in his pocket this year.
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At Guntersville, everyone talked about keying in on the shad spawn in the morning with a spinnerbait. KVD did that, but he wasn't satisfied with only the brief flurry of activity in the morning. To claim the win, he managed to eke out more strikes with the crank when the blade bite died. He averaged 22 pounds a day over the three-day event (Day 1 was cancelled) and credited the crank with his door slamming twenty-five pound sack the last day. |
Two months later KVD was at it again, with his second Elite Series victory of the year at Grand Lake. While virtually everyone else flipped the flooded willows, KVD absolutely whacked the bass with his Sexy Shad diver. He credited the new color pattern and his upgraded Mustad trebles with helping him win, but in reality it was the numbers and quality of fish he found that made the difference. Despite legions of spectator boats, or perhaps because of those 'tators, he caught dozens and dozens of bass to once again show that he's the dominant angler of our generation, if not ever.
Horton also utilized a crank in his win at Champlain. When the fish turned off to his jig bite, he dredged his loaded rockpile with a Fat Free Shad on heavy line.
Competitors were ready to flip mats and throw a trap at the season-ending event at Toho. Those techniques played a role, but Ben Matsubu, the angler with the $100,000 check at the end of four days, had thrown a Lucky Craft RC crankbait. A surprise? Not if you know your fishing history. Matsubu made it to the Elites through last year's wild card event, also in Florida, where he did the same thing.
The Dropshot
Our first three featured techniques have all been bubba baits, but in many respects this was the year when what Clunn once called "California sissy baits" showed they can slay Goliath.
It started at the Delta, where a savant named Aaron Martens crushed a field of power baiting fishermen with spinning gear. Granted, his combination of a Megabass rod, Daiwa Steez reel and Sunline fluorocarbon may cost more than a mortgage payment on your house, but it appears to have paid for itself with a $100,000 payday.
| And it wasn't like it was some low-weight slugfest. Included in Aaron's second day 30-pound sack (or sacks, since California law requires that each fish over 5 pounds have a separate bag) were a 10 and an 11. The former was caught on the dropshot. When he hooked it, his amateur partner asked what he could do to help and all Aaron could say was "Pray, dude, pray!" |
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Fred Roumbanis used the dropshot to take home $250k from High Rock. But it wasn't just westerners who got in on the act. Boyd Duckett dropshotted a Berkley handpour to secure his biggest bag at the final Major on Dardanelle.
Edwin Evers got in on the act, too, at Erie, where it was the dominant pattern. But for E-Squared it was more like a video game than pure fishing. He'd watch the smallies come up to his dropshot on his graph and react as much to the sight as to what was transmitted through his rod.
The Lipless Crankbait
The year started with the Classic, where Boyd Duckett caught most of his fish on an old-school Bill Lewis Rat-L-Trap – not necessarily burning it or ripping it, but rather crawling it across the bottom.
KVD wasn't too far behind thanks to the new Strike King Red Eye Shad. This was Van Dam at his best….chunking and winding, wading through not only numbers of fish, but numbers of BIG fish.
By the time the Delta rolled around, everyone was ready to burn a lipless crank, but it was Derek Remitz who did it best. Parked in the wilds of lower Frank's Tract, he too pulled out the original trap and got to work. Poor kid only got second in this one, but it was a critical step in establishing him as a force to be reckoned with.
Flipping Mats with Big Weights and Soft Plastics
The big stick, braided line, heavy tungsten weight and compact flip bait aren't just for Florida anymore. If you aren't prepared to sacrifice your elbow tendons, you can't compete with the big boys these days.
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Boyd Duckett was the first to prove that the broomstick would play a big role this year. While he relied heavily on a Trap for his Classic win, as described above, he couldn't have claimed the crown without punching a Berkley Chigger Craw through the thick matted stuff. It led him to an 8 pound beast the first day and to the 6 pounder that clinched it on the last day.
By the time the Capitol Clash started, the Potomac looked more like a putting green than a river. From DC down toward the Chesapeake Bay, there was more grass than ever before. Edges? We don't need no stinking edges? They key for most competitors was to ram their rigs deep into the thick, nasty hydrilla and milfoil and then punch a compact plastic bait through. The braided line manufacturers were salivating. |
The technique produced matching 8-02's for Gary Klein and James Niggemeyer. Kelly Jordon followed up last year's win with a second place finish, flip flopping with AOY Skeet Reese. Oddly enough, while Reese caught most of his fish with the flip stick, the area of Nanjemoy Creek that he seined was primarily grass-free wood. Each day, though, he stopped at a grassbed on the long run back and communed with his peers by taking a few green fish from under the canopies.
http://www.basszone.com/2007zlines/top6lures.htm
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