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In the late 50s and
early 60s, we discovered other types of lures. Rubber worms took their
place in the
tackle box, and later spinner baits then modern soft plastics were all
the rage.
In the 70s, crankbaits
made a reappearance starting with a plug called the Big O. This big
round body bait
caught fish everywhere it went, and pretty soon, it and all it's
imitators were pretty much everywhere. As all
baits overexposed are prone to do, it cooled off after a few years and
fishermen moved on to new baits once
again. Carolina Rigs brought plastic worms back into vogue and the
spinnerbaits had a big run.
But then came along
one Mr. Rick Clunn. He was already well established on the tour making
an early
name for himself throwing spinner baits. He started winning consistently
at the bigger tournaments, and won
a couple of Bassmaster Classics. Then he designed some flat sided baits
with a tight wiggle for a small lure
company called Poe's that specialized in cedar lures. When Rick won the
Bassmaster Classic again with his
shallow running baits, the rush was on! Spurred by a wonderful blow by
blow account of Rick's winning day
with the RC1 and RC3 baits, (he had the tournament pretty much sewn up
by 9:00), and a fantastic come
from behind victory, crankbaits were rediscovered. At least RC1 and RC3
crankbaits. Everyone was throwing
crankbaits and a few were catching fish. But quietly in the background,
new ways to fish them were being
developed.
The next year found
crankbaits in the news again. This time, Paul Elias had used an
obnoxious looking
oversized plastic crankbait loaded with BBs called the Mann's Loudmouth
to make a run in the Chesapeake
Bay Classic. Paul's Big Bass, caught on national TV caught the
imaginations of fishermen as well as the fish,
(Ken Cook won in '92 with a spinner bait, but that's another story.)
These big old deep divers had been around
for several years, and since everyone knew the bigger fish were down
deep, it was only a matter of time before
someone connected. But wait a minute! Paul wasn't deep! Paul was
throwing this lure designed to be fished in
15' of water in just 5' of water! But won't it hit bottom? Sure it will,
that's the whole idea! Churns up the bottom
just like a crawdad. Never mind that it's blue and green, it's a crawdad
in the mud. Color just lets them see it
good!
That's also the year
we learned a new word about crankbaits, "deflection". Paul's
theory was the fish
wouldn't touch a crankbait just pulled through the water. It needed to
bounce off something to give it an erratic
motion. And while other people were making a little tuff of mud plumes
with their jigs, Paul was digging
trenches in the mud with his crankbait. And he won cash doing it! About
that time all of the other pros chimed
in "Sure, we knew that all along!" The word was never to throw
a crankbait unless it hit something. About
anything would do. Hit the bottom, hit the weeds, hit the rocks, hit the
stumps, hit the dock pilings, hit
anything but make sure it deflected the lure, that's when all the
strikes come.
Well, why didn't
someone tell us that before. We can all throw a crankbait into something
hard and get a
deflection, can't we? The next spring saw overhanging trees and
underwater stumps across America filled
with ugly blue/green rattling, deep diving crankbaits. Tom Mann retired
a rich man while making them and
Paul Elias got several new endorsement deals. There were so many rattles
in the lures that year I'm surprised
the fish didn't climb out of the water just to get some peace and quiet.
And the hot color that year was brown,
red, and black, just like a crawfish.
The next year was
Robert Hamilton's turn. He threw a crankbait right over the top of a
brush pile setting on
top of a hump with nobody around and won the Classic doing it! Again, a
spinner bait and worm played heavily
in his game plan, but all of the talk was about throwing crankbaits
around brush. It had always worked around
fish attractors, right? Might be something to this stuff after all!
Tackle boxes and tree stumps across the land
were filled with crankbaits until the trays and limbs rattled. Even Bill
Dance was giving shows on crankbaits.
The crankbait craze
was well underway. Fast forward to a relatively unknown pro, again in
the Bassmaster
Classic, by the name of Mr. David Fritz. While everyone else was
deflecting crankbaits off of shallow cover,
David found a way fish crankbaits deeper than anyone else had since the
trolling days. Dave rediscovered
what our grandfathers knew, put a crankbait in deep water, work it slow,
and really BIG fish will slam it.
Everyone spent the
following few months buying deep water crankbaits and moving to offshore
structure,
sure that it was all figured out at last. About that time, it was a new
tournament year, and guess who was in
the winner circle again. Yelp, Dave did it again, and the next week,
again! Unheard of! How? Why? And this
time he was in shallow water when everyone else went deep! What's going
on! Turns out Dave's secret wasn't
just going deep. He had developed a whole new system on how to fish
crankbaits and it worked just about
anywhere he cared to try it. Dave was about the only one who noticed
that Rick's earlier win had come
throwing crankbaits where few others dared, straight into the heavy
wood. Rick was fishing the knees of
cypress trees, and Robert was fishing brush piles. Dave was fishing bush
piles, stumps, timber, or anything
else wood he could find, and the fish loved it! Wood has always been a
known magnet for bass, and people
have been throwing crankbaits in wood since they were invented, (much to
the delight of lure manufacturers.)
So why now, after all
these years, was a wooden crankbait working around wood cover the magic
answer?
There had to be more
to this story. We now know that Dave hadn't been throwing near the wood,
but right
into the heart of it, treble hooks blazing. Anyone who has ever tried
this, say every fisherman in the world,
knows with a doubt this is a pretty dumb thing to do since you always
get hung up. Well, you almost always
get hung up. Turns out if you start using a little smaller hook, you
don't get hung up so much. And if you keep
some tension on the line, the bill of the bait will bounce off the wood
and you don't get hung up so much. And
if you go really, really slow, you don't get hung up so much. And if
when you feel the lure move up and hit a
limb, then give it a little slack, the lure will kind of float up from
behind the limb, and you don't get hung up so
much. And, of course, if a 5 pound bass swallows the lure down to his
anal fin, you don't get hung up much at
all! And guess what happens when you're the first one do all of these
things at once? Yelp, that's right, you
win the Bassmaster Classic and everything else you enter. Still a couple
of problems here.
Now let me see if I
have this right. I'm suppose to crank real slow and when I hit a limb,
let the lure float out
from behind it. But how in the world am I suppose to get the lure down
there to start with?!? If I reel slow, the
bait doesn't dive deep enough to get to the limb, and if I reel fast, I
get hung up! What's the deal here? OH!
You didn't tell me about adding lead to the lure to make it float up
real slow! Just almost to where it suspends,
right? The following year broke all records for sales of drill presses
and lead melting pots at Sears. You just
couldn't fish without one of these specially weighted lures. And since
you have to practice drilling and filling a
little to get it right, we better buy some extra lures while we're at it
just in case, much to the manufacturer's
disappointment, I'm sure.
Fortunately, right
before we had to buy 10 different versions of each lure to make sure we
had the correct
rise rate, someone came up with an idea that ranks right up there with
the paper clip, Post It note, and pet
rock, the Suspend-A-Dot. Take some thin lead foil, add a water proof
glue backing, put it in a plastic package,
show it to a couple of fishermen, and buy that retirement island in the
Bahamas.
One of the better
ideas for crankbaits and jerkbaits ever come up with. They come with
both a small dot,
and a strip equal to about 3 of the dots. Just peel them off and stick
them to the underside of your favorite
lure, and PRESTO, instant rise rate control. Just about every lure in my
box has a couple of them on there
somewhere. You can not only change the rise rate, or make a suspending
version of the lure, but you can
control the action of the lure by where you place them on it's body. I
only wish I had of thought of it. Now
there is one other little part of this crankbait thing. Remember that
part about the smaller hooks? Guess
what happens when a pro just barely hooks a bass, works him out of the
cover, then looses him when the
fish jumps right beside the boat? Right again, you learn a lot of new
words your mom never taught you.
In order for all of
this system to work, you have to come up with some way to keep a big
fish, just barely
hooked, attached to the lure. Well, it turns out the fly fishermen have
been having that problem for years, and
they invented fly rods. With a fly rod, the rod has so much give, it's
almost impossible for the fish, even on a
tiny hook, to throw the bait or get any slack. Just keep the line pulled
up and don't try to overpower the fish,
and the rod does the rest.
Well, back when
flippin' first got started, they put a rod length limit of 8' on the
rods to keep people from
doodlin' with 20' rods. And bait caster looks pretty stupid on a fly rod
anyway. But if you go back and pull out
one of those old wet noodle rods we used in the 60s, you get pretty much
the same effect. If you happen to
make one of those rods with modern light weight material, all the
better. So, grab yourself about a 7' light
action rod and some line that will take the abrasion of rubbing against
wood all day, and you're pretty much
set up to go. And over the next year or so, everyone bought light action
rods and truck loads of wooden
crankbaits. They then proceeded to loose enough wood to frame a 3
bedroom house. But after some practice,
most of them did start tapping in on those heavy cover bass, even if
they did cost them about $20 an ounce.
I can only pray Denny Brauer wins the next Classic so we can all get
back to flipping sticks and jigs before
we go broke.
Speaking of going
broke, I guess you've now all see the new "super" crankbaits.
In the few years since
Paul Elias introduced us to Chartreuse with a Blue back as a natural
color, those clever Japanese have taken
their color copies, love of bass fishing, and some assorted bait fish to
produce crankbaits for $40 a pop. Now
you can have a lure that not only looks like a shad, but actually has a
life sized picture of a shad pasted over
it's sides. Not to be outdone, other manufacturers have jumped in the
fray offering museum quality prints of
blue gill, threadfin shad, and crawfish under a gel coat better than on
your Ranger on lures of the proper size,
weight, action, and having $5 hooks hanging from the belly.
I honestly don't have
the heart to put one of the pieces of art in the water, even if I go
crazy enough to give
you $50 for one. I'm sure they catch fish. And I'll also buy in on them
catching more fish to a point. But if I had
the money to fill a tackle box with these new lures, I'd buy a house
instead. Anyway, I'm saving my money for
that new $400 Loomis rod I have my eye on.
So, what have we
learned so far. Well, crankbaits work better around heavy cover,
(there's a surprise), and
catch more fish if you bounce them off of something giving them an
erratic motion, (another surprise.) They
work even better if you crank them in real, real slow, and to make them
work at these slower speeds, you
need to add a little weight to get them down, (will wonders never
cease.) You need all the help you can get
if you use small hooks. And a fisherman will buy damn near anything if
it wins the Bassmaster Classic!
See you on the water. I've
got to go to the store for some more crankbaits.
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