Part I: Tim Horton & YUM Vibra King Tubes
When the BASS Pro Tour ventures to Florida or another destination that calls for flippin’ in heavy grass, Tim Horton doesn’t spend much time pondering bait choices. Equipped with a flippin’ stick, a good supply of YUM Vibra King Tubes and a bit of terminal tackle, Horton has everything he needs to catch big bass.
Horton, who ran away with the BASS Angler of the Year title in his rookie season and has qualified for the Bassmaster Classic for the past five years, has won two BASS events with Vibra King Tubes. In his most recent win, which was last fall on Lake Okeechobee, every fish he brought to the scales bit a Vibra King Tube, including the biggest fish of the tournament.
Horton likes many things about a Vibra King Tube, but its big-fish appeal clearly tops the list. Adorned with ribs and 4 ½ inches long, the Vibra King Tube is a bulky soft plastic tube bait that offers a large profile, and Horton has found that it attracts larger bass overall than anything else he has tried flipping into grass.
Horton always has liked tubes for punching grass because they slip though the vegetation easily. However, until he discovered the Vibra King Tube, Horton never was satisfied with the size of fish tubes produced.
“What impressed me when I tried the Vibra King Tube was the size of the fish. Other lures may produce as many fish when they are flipped through the grass, but you can catch bigger fish with this bait,” Horton said.
Along with building the Vibra King Tube’s profiles, the bait’s ribs push a lot of water and create vibrations, which Horton believes helps the fish find his offering in really thick vegetation. Also important for punching the bait through thick cover, it has a solid-head design, which helps hook stay in place and the bait stay rigged correctly.
Horton rigs a Vibra King Tube with a 4/0 Tx3 Wide Gap Hook and buries the hook point among the ribs when he pushes it back through the tube. It is absolutely critical to rig a tube weedless because otherwise it will spin and twist the line, he stressed. He uses a 1-ounce Excalibur Tg (tungsten) weight, 25-pound test Silver Thread Excalibur or heavy braid and a 7 1/2-foot All Star flippin’ stick matched with a Pflueger Trion reel.
Horton fishes thick vegetation efficiently, picking his spots carefully and paying attention to where he gets strikes. If the vegetation is sparse to moderately thick, he looks for the densest spots he can find. If it’s extra thick, he looks for edges, holes, greener spots, protruding hard cover and other irregularities.
He also fishes spots quickly. He punches the bait through, bounces it a couple times and then pulls it back up to make another flip. “If they’re going to take it, they’ll usually do so as soon as they see it,” he said.