By Lawrence Taylor
Legendary Lake Rayburn angler and fishing instructor Will Kirkpatrick has his corks out again. He was one of the first guys to land a double-digit bass on the YUM Fat Money Minnow (with a cork shoved in its tail). He’s always tinkering with lures to make them more appealing to bass, or more directly, to the situation he’s facing. Kirkpatrick is one of those guys who once he discovers and develops a pattern, is likely to tie on something else just to see if he can catch them a different way.
Kirkpatrick phoned today to let me know what’s been working for him at Rayburn in the last few weeks. He’s fishing an area where a ditch comes up from 40 feet of water into a “bowl” of water 6 to 18 feet deep. The bowl features rocks and weeds.
“Lures need to be realistic,” he said, “especially on pressured fish. This lake has had more than 400 tournaments on it this year. These are pressured fish.”
Kirkpatrick, who is an electronics genius, knew there were fish in the area and tried a few techniques with limited success. Then he tied on a 3/16-ounce Baby Boo Jig in PB&J color pattern and used a 3.75-inch Green Pumpkin Craw Papi as a trailer. Simple enough, but here’s the kicker. Kirkpatrick inserted a small cork (available at hardware and hobby stores) into the head of the Craw Papi.
“It’s got to be a hollow lure or there’s no place to stick the cork,” he said. “I tried a bunch of different colors and the jig color didn’t seem to matter as much as the color of the Craw Papi. I caught some fish on 3D Watermelon Red and Black Neon/Pumpkin jigs, but the PB&J and 3D Green Pumpkin were the best.”
Kirkpatrick says that crawfish change colors throughout the year as a result of molting and natural factors and he thinks that the color combination he found last week matches what the crawfish in his lake look like right now.
“What do the trout anglers call it, matching the hatch?” he said. “That’s exactly what we’re doing – making it as natural as possible.”
Kirkpatrick does a lot of what I call “thinking under water,” which simply means he’s concerned with what his bait is doing when he can’t see it. He wants it to behave like a meal and tinkers and alters baits to achieve the desired results.
“That cork in the head of the craw causes the jig to fall differently and with a slower sink rate,” he said. “About half the fish I caught were on the initial drop, and the other half came after I let it hit bottom. If you’ve ever watched a bass come up on a crawfish, it goes into a defense position with its claws up. That’s really what I was trying to accomplish with the cork in the head. When that bait hit bottom the craw’s head floats up and I shake the rod tip to make the claws move.”
Kirkpatrick also found that line size mattered as well. He had to go to 14-pound mono to get the pattern nailed down, a fact that lost him several big bass that broke off when they tangled in woody cover.
“But what are you going to do?” he said. “That’s just bass fishing.”
So if Kirkpatrick ever tells you to stick a cork in it, you might want to listen up. He may just be letting you in on another secret fishing tip.
Here’s another unique rig that showed its merit lately. Matt Straw is an editor with In-Fisherman magazine and I was fortunate enough to fish with him just before Labor Day on the upper Mississippi River near St. Cloud, Minn. There were three of us in the boat, and when it came time to fish he volunteered to take the back of the boat. His back-of-the-boat rig was a wacky rigged Houdini Worm or YUM Dinger under a float. The rig is deceptively simple and easy to scoff at – no bass fisherman worth his salt fishes with a float! That’s just ridiculous.
Straw is an extremely nice guy and a fantastic fisherman, and he showed us we were flat out wrong. Being in the back of the boat, he had two anglers seining the water in front of him, so he was doing something totally different. The float rig allowed him to cast to likely looking spots, then feed line out as we moved along so his rig stayed in the same high-percentage area. Often it was just waves that provided the action he needed on the wacky rig and he caught as many smallies as anyone on the trip. He also tried a YUM Dinger on the rig and continued catching fish.
It’s easy to see that anytime you’re fishing relatively shallow, this rig catches them. It’s great for the back of the boat or for youngsters. The smallmouth bass that struck Straw’s wacky float rig did so with gusto and often hooked themselves.
Friend Stan Fagerstrom, who is a casting champion and legendary angler and outdoor writer, wrote in one of his blogs: “Never – repeat, never – get so set in fishing a given lure in one certain way that you fail to try something different with the same bait if the fish aren’t responding.” Stan’s a wise man who understands that just because a lure is intended to be fished in one stringent manner, it doesn’t mean that it won’t catch fish in a different manner under different conditions.