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Getting
Ready
The tools of the trade are a pair 7 1/2'
All-Star pitching sticks and a couple of near antique Lews bait
casters spooled with 20 lb monofilament. Charlie has tried maybe 50
different rods over the years, and the
All-Stars are his personal favorite. Any quality bait caster is fine as
long as it works smooth and has enough
drag to handle the heavy line in the heaviest cover. Although he uses
monofilament, I about had him
convinced in the worth of 50 lb braided line for the task at hand, (he
says he'll try it and get back to us.)
The important thing is a line capable of handling a big fish along with
several pounds of weeds and take the
abrasion of heavy cover for the whole day.
The terminal tackle
was one of the more interesting details. Charlie uses a 1 oz weight for
"normal" cover,
say about the consistency of a submerged rain forest, and may go down to
a 3/4 oz weight for "thin" cover,
say a Kissimmee grass mats. Thinking this was overkill, I confess I
tried at one point to revert to a 1/2 oz.
sinker after having lost about 3 of his 1 oz models. The result was my
bait posing rather pretty on the top of
the same stuff we had been going through all day. After about ten
minutes of watching my bait while
watching his go out of sight, I'm a believer. And, what for me was the
most surprising thing, never ever peg
the sinker. Pegging the sinker is really unnecessary to get the compact
bait down, or back, and very few
tiny crawfish weigh an ounce or more, something a big bass is bound to
know.
The hook was a
straight shanked Mustad Wide Gap 4/0 sharpened to a needle point. The
key points here
are the straight shank, (off set worm hooks hang up in the cover just
about every flip), and the way he
attaches the line. The only thing he uses is a Snell knot, (instruction
provided upon request). By snelling the
line on the hook, you get two important advantages:
1) the hook hand perfectly straight below the
sinker; and
2) there is no knot to be banging against the underside of the sinker.
The straight hanging bait will slip effortlessly in
the smallest opening and will exit with equal ease. It
certainly makes a day of flipping heavy cover much more enjoyable when
you don't have 1/2 pound of weeds
on the hook every time you put it in the water. And with no knot against
the sinker, you get a couple of
benefits. The obvious advantage is the knot doesn't take a beating when
trying to get the hook back which is
particularly useful when a fish is attached. The less obvious but just
as important point is the bait and the
eye of hook stay as far as possible nestled in the protected hollow of
the sinker reducing hang ups in even
the most stringy cover.
The secret bait? An
Allen's 3" craw. This junior size bait seems at first too small for
the 4/0 hook much
less a 10 lb bass. Both with accept the craw readily. Simply worm the
craw on the hook as normal and push
the hook point into the nose leaving the hook gap extending below the
bait. The bass don't seem to mind the
hook gap a bit and it works as a bit of a weed guard to boot. The rear
legs are pinched off to let the craw
slide through the weeds better and there really isn't much of a claw to
get hung up either. What you end up
with is an extremely compact package, well protected and rigged to
slither in the tiniest slit in the cover.
Does the bait really
make a difference? All I can tell you is during my first solo trip with
this system, I
couldn't find the 3" version so I tried to settle with the 4"
Allen. I spend much of the day trying to get the bait
into and out of what I had been taught to be medium heavy cover with
more frustration than success. Next
trip out, (and after 40 gallons of gas), I was properly armed with the
3" version and found the cover was
magically easier to penetrate and actually did have some rather
impressive fish below it.
The final touches are
the dressing for the bait. Charlie likes to dye his own baits and adds a
liberal amount
of garlic salt to the dye. His craws not only look good but taste just
like pizza, a known preference for all
teenagers and apparently bass as well. For darker waters, there is just
enough room in the tiny claws for a
couple of small worm rattles which seem to improve the number of bites.
Add a dash of your favorite bug
juice to help the package slide through the weeds and you're ready to
go.
When and
Where to Go Flippin'
Flippin' works all year long other
than about 2 weeks when the fish are actively on the beds. That doesn't
mean it's all the same regardless of season or weather. The
"perfect" flipping day is cool with high skies and
about a 10 mile per hour wind. The high skies was music to my ears since
it's these types of days that
dedicated open water types struggle. The wind tends to hide the boat and
noise by breaking up the top of
the water and makes boat handling into the wind at least more
predictable if not easier. As with all fishing,
cold fronts are a mixed blessing. "The toughest days are the third
day after a cold front", Charlie states.
"The actual day of the front can be good as the fish tighten up in
the cover, but as the days pass, the bite
gets tougher. Cloudy days can slow a flippin' bite when the fish scatter
out to feed. Still, day in and day out,
flippin' is the most reliable way to get bit, especially by a big fish.
The actual base type
of cover can change with the season. During the cold water times of
winter, mud
tussocks and other hard canopies work the best. During the transition
periods of spring and fall, mixed
canopies of pads, lilies, hyachin and such hold the most fish. Hydrilla
turns on in mid summer into the fall
as it tops out and lays over in a mat.
Fishing Hydrilla is a
hard wind sport for Charlie. The best days are in a twenty mile per hour
or better wind.
On the days most folks hide and wait for the wind to lay, Charlie is
hard at work drifting over the top of
hydrilla fields. "You can either keep the motors up or trim down
just a touch to even the boat in the drift so
both of you can fish. Keep your eyes out with the wave action to see
those spots in the mat where the
weeds are laying over a hole. The mats are just full of holes covered
with the laid over hydrilla. The fish are
in the holes, not in the middle of the stalks. Just make sure you flip
to one side or the other of the drift. If
you're flippin' right in front of where the boat is headed and hook a
good fish, the boat will drift over the top
of him before you can dig him out, then you're done."
The idea of holes in
hydrilla is consistent with his general theory of flippin'. Charlie
figures fish don't like to
be rubbed on the side constantly, so they will look for an area to
suspend underneath a mat, preferably close
the vertical cover. He's looking for fish where they live, not just
visit to feed, in Charlie's words, "A fish house."
If you are a fish,
there are some very specific things about a fish house which sets it
apart from all of the
rest of the cover. A house does not make a home, but then again neither
does a tent. First, and foremost,
you need a roof over your head, preferably a good sturdy one which
shields you not only from the sun, but
the peering eyes of predators. We're looking for a house, not a shed, so
some strong vertical structure in the
middle of the cover work well for walls and give you a few more escape
options. And like any good house, it
needs a firm foundation, in this case some type of emergent cover,
(sticks, pads, or such), that will anchor
the roof. And perhaps the most important, some living space, giving you
room to move around and a clear
view for any dangerous invaders.
When you hit the
water, you'll be at once surprised how common, and yet how unique a fish
house truly
is. You may idle past miles of emergent vegetation and never see a
single house. Then you run into an area
where a good house is every twenty feet. One of the easiest signs of a
good house is pads or reeds growing
up through the canopy. This shows you the mat has most likely been there
for a while and shows a strong
vertical structure. In the case of pads, most times the bottom will be
silt filled and bare of other vegetation,
giving you the perfect house, (Charlie just loves pad fields.) The more
tangled and messy the top, the better.
This will lock the mat in place around the vegetation and it may stay
there for months or years, giving a fish
every chance in the world to call it home.
Flippin in
the House
There are a couple of things about
getting to them where they live. First, your bait is an invader, and
like
any good homeowner, the fish will be quick to defend it's territory. In
other words, if he's there, chances are
he'll bite regardless if he's hungry or not. Second, he's safe at home,
so chances are slim you're going to
spook him out of his lair. I was amazed by just how much of a ruckus we
could make trying to cut through
a pad field and still get bit when we got there. You may put him on
alert, but you kind of want that way
anyhow. There is a lot to be said for a quiet approach, but it's not an
absolute necessity and the best houses
are almost by definition the hardest to get to. Third, if you're a fish
once you find a good house, you don't
move. Charlie can tell you story after story of catching the exact same
fish in the exact same house, days,
weeks, or months apart. He's caught some of those fish so many times he
has them named. That should
also tell if you miss a good fish in a spot, much sure to make a return
trip later.
Good houses are hard
to find, so they tend to stay occupied. If you catch a fish in a good
spot, chances
are excellent a new owner will move in within a couple of days. And
competition can be fierce for a prime
location. If you catch a small fish from a small house next to a better
one, there is likely a bigger, meaner
owner of the better spot. Home or not, a bigger fish is the prime spot's
owner and quite likely to object to
intruders. And it can work both ways. If all you catch from prime
locations is dinks, that can tell you the
bigger fish are elsewhere and turn your attention to the next area.
The best term I can
come up with on how Charlie flips is "high percentage." It's
kind of cherry picking your
spots to the nth degree. First I guess you need to know that Charlie is
serious about his fishing and spends
some serious time doing it. Charlie fishes 5 days a week and probably
has a better attendance record than I
do at work. He covers a tremendous amount of water and can hit half the
lake in a single day. Since he
spends so much time on the lake, there are few houses that he doesn't
know the address. To make all of
his calls on a given day, he can't spend much time at any single spot. A
mat less than about 10' across
deserves a single flip right in the middle. A mat twenty feet across,
maybe four or five flips. Fish or not,
Charlie's off to the next location. If he catches a couple of fish in a
small area, then things slow down and
get more intense scrutiny. But it's up to the fish to slow him down. All
of the time between houses, (and
there isn't much with the trolling motor on high), is spent resting, not
flipping. In 8 hours on the water, I
never saw him make a single pitch to a place he didn't think held a
fish.
All things being
equal, Charlie would rather flip isolated houses just big enough for a
single fish. Even
when you find an "apartment building" it isn't worth too much
time. "The fish could be anywhere", Charlie
observes. "I rather spend my time flipping into 10 houses and the
travel time in between than waste it on a
single spot that I don't know whether or not a fish is within 50 feet.
Some times you don't have a choice
because the isolated cover just isn't there. But if it is, your odds are
a lot better of putting a lure in front of a
fish than randomly working an acre of stuff that's all the same."
Undercut banks sometimes draw his interest,
but only if the canopy extends out a few feet and has some depth to the
water underneath. In this case the
trolling motor stays running until the fish slow him down.
This run and gun
technique with a trolling motor is used when prefishing. Come tournament
time, it gets
worse. Perfectly consistent with all of the theory, it boils down to a
single element. The only place they fish
is where they have already caught a good fish when prefishing. That
doesn't mean a general area, that
means a specific mat. Now when each mat is only 10 to 15 feet across and
only takes a few flips to cover...
well, you get the idea. They can burn a full tank of gas during a
tournament and never loose sight of the
ramp. That's what I mean about high percentage. Only fish where you know
there's fish, do it quickly and
efficiently, and spend the time on the water to find enough of those
spots to fill a day. On his home waters
of Orange Lake, Charlie may hit 50 to 100 spots during a tournament. On
a strange body of water, he only
knows a half of dozen areas, but they are really good areas and he
doesn't mind slowing down to work them
hard. When you consider the time and effort they put into their fishing,
Rigdon and Flowers may simply be
the prime example of the best team going in is the best team coming out.
There's still no substitute for hard
work and time on the water.
When it comes time to
make that single flip under the mat, it's a good time to remember what
drew you
there in the first place. If you're only going to take one shot, aim
well. One of the features of a prime house
was an emergent stalk or such coming up through the mat. Use that stalk
as an entry point. It will generally
give you that tiny break in the mat you need to get the bait down and
chances are pretty fair any fish under
there is relating the vertical cover anyway. It also gives you a bit of
a head start at getting any fish you find
out of there.
Gettin' Bit
Oddly enough, the biggest problem
I've had flippin' is after I got the bite. I would either set too fast
and
miss the fish entirely, or set hard only to loose the fish either coming
up through the weeds or beside the
boat. I changed my set on Charlie's instructions and have had a definite
increase in both hook up ratio and
getting the fish in the boat.
Charlie says,
"When you feel the tick, let him have it just a second or two. A
smaller fish needs a chance
to get the bait in his mouth. Don't wait too long, because every second
you do wait the fish is probably doing
something under there you won't like. When you set the hook just a
slight set is all you need. If you use a
hard hook set all you'll do is rip his mouth and he'll be gone as soon
as he gets on top of the weeds." One of
Charlie's other pupils who I got a chance to talk to told me he had
abandon setting the hook all together. He
just pulls up as if he's playing the fish and the fish will hook
himself.
Before you give up on
setting the hook you need to understand one caution. This whole
discussion is
about Charlie's system including where Charlie fishes. The reason the
lack of a hook set works is you're
working the a vertical presentation through what is for all intents and
purposes a rigid canopy. The line is
going to get tighter no matter which direction the fish moves from
directly under the entry hole. If you're
flipping outside the canopy on the edge nearest the boat, then a fish
who moves under your boat is going to
put a ton of slack in the line so big hook sets will be required. I
learned this unfortunate lesson during the
last tournament when I lost a good fish when he swam under the boat and
I used a limp hook set.
Assuming you get a
good hook set, you're still not home free. The fish is under several
hundred pounds
of wet weeds and not in a particularly good mood. Pull, (not jerk), the
fish up into the canopy and call for
your partner. The fish will normally freeze up when you push his face in
the weeds so don't take a chance
of ripping his mouth by trying to horse he up through the canopy. Your
partner can simply lean over the side
and part the weeds around your line until he finds a fish, (this is not
entirely safe if you happen to have a
snake or gator right beside your line, but then again what is.) If the
fish is under about 3 pounds, it's most
likely easiest to simply lift him into the boat rather than fool with a
net. Bigger fish will require a more
coordinated partner to part the weeds and net the fish at the same time.
Either way, it's your job to control
the tension on the line and get the fish up and out of the weeds. Have
patients and wait for your partner to
do his part of the job. You'll have a much better chance of landing a
fish working as a team than getting
excited and trying to be a hero.
Well, that's really
all there is to it. No Magic. No Mystery. Hard work and faith in a
proven system is all it
takes to dominate the local tournament scene. Charlie Flower's Flipping
System is easy and makes sense.
It's certainly not the only system, not even the only flipping system.
But you must admit it is a system that
works well for them and now at least you know what you're up against.
I'm not ready to abandon my open
water fishing, but when it comes time to go flipping, I for one am a
believer in that system because it sure
makes sense to me. Thanks Charlie! See You At Weigh In. I'm going
looking for a Fish House.
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