By Vic Attardo
How’s this for irony: You’re a 16-time BASSMASTER Classic contender; You’re from Texas where you’re a bass fishing legend and high master of the sport; You didn’t exactly invent a famous topwater bait – the Rebel Pop R – but you modified it in such a way that the company created a totally new bait out of it and named it after you?
Then, to continue the facts, you travel to a major B.A.S.S tournament in New York, in August, where the topwater smallmouth fishing is superb and your bait is expected to be a major player.
Unfortunately during the tournament you barely catch a bass on YOUR bait and you’re out of the contest before the final day. That’s not nice at all.
But along comes a kid, a kid from Texas no less, a rookie in this string of major tournaments, and he wins the darn tournament with YOUR named bait. Wins it! (Fortunately he credits your bait for the landing his fish.)
Well, if that isn’t I-R-O-N-Y, I don’t know my Webster’s.
Yet that’s what happened to Zell Rowland recently on Lake Oneida during the last regular B.A.S.S. tournament of the year. Rowland’s famous XCalibur Zell Pop, a superb topwater instrument stacked them in the boat for Chad Griffin but for Rowland, the guy who invented it, popularized it, and is known for making it work when a lot of other lures are colder than dead fish bones, couldn’t get a bite with the bait.
But there’s more.
The day after the tournament, Rowland, a grand gentleman and tireless ambassador for the sport, takes a lowly fishing writer out on the same lake – that would be me - and together they crush the smallmouth – crush in the way of combining for over a hundred big smallmouth from morning to late afternoon.
And with the tipsied mojo of the moment, not one of those one hundred smallmouth – a conservative estimate as well - was caught with the named bait. It took a couple of other excellent lures from the same company to gather these fish and some beautiful walleye. If Zell would have caught these bass during the tournament on any bait, he might have walked away with the trophy and the cash.
And there’s yet another ironic note to all this: Zell kept trying to score Oneida’s schooling smallmouth with the great Zell Pop but he couldn’t. Which doesn’t mean you shouldn’t use the Pop for veracious schooling bass because, after all, Chad Griffin, who is at least twenty-five years younger than Zell, won the darn tournament with the thing.
“It’s against my religion not to try a popper,” Rowland said as he intermittently picked up and put down the Zell Pop while we both caught big bass on the XCalibur Xt3 twitch bait, the XCalibur Xr50 lipless crankbait, a Yum Tube and, for me, a wacky rigged Yum Dinger. For some unknown reason our intensely feeding bass would not take the topwater bait but they attacked the twitch bait, the rattling lipless crankbait, the tube and the soft-plastic stickbait.
And because I’m keeping this on the light side I’ve got another Zell story to tell you.
While using the twitch bait, Zell actually hooked and landed two bass on the same lure. I don’t mean two bass at different times or two bass back-to-back on the same bait or any other permutation you can think of. I’m saying two bass hit the same lure during the same single cast and Zell brought in both fish together.
When I looked over the side of the boat, I saw two smallmouth connected to the three-and-a-half inch Xt3. One was lock-jawed onto the front treble hook while another was festooned (I like that word) onto the rear set. Two bass hanging from two hooks on the same small lure.
“That’s happened but twice in my life,” said Rowland with his slight Texas drawl. “Once in tournament when I threw them both back because I was already culling and now once with you.”
If I sat down and told Rowland all the strange things that have happened to other anglers while they’re with me, we’d both still be sitting in the boat on Oneida.
In the coming weeks, you have a great chance to get in on frenzied smallmouth on some of our better lakes. Tool around on the water, look for diving birds – seagulls or terns – taking baitfish on the surface and lots of fishy splashes.
The action begins with a couple of bass corralling a pod of bait into a tighter and tighter mass. Then set for the kill, they push the bait towards the surface. Smallmouth rush the bait – either minnows or fry – gulping loads at a time and/or stunning their prey. Usually the surface splashes only last a couple of seconds but can resume a few yards or much further away. Sometimes the bass wait for the stunned bait to sink then they mop up what’s left. The birds dive amid all this commotion taking escaping and stunned bait. After one bass attack on Oneida I collected fingerling shad and fingerling perch. Neither was longer than an inch.
Of course, the baits we used and the ones you’ll use are larger than that. Frankly, I don’t know why bass take the bigger baits but I suspect they’re just gulping at whatever is in their way -- as long as it somehow mimics their prey with color and commotion. Believe me, a bunch of other baits did not work on Oneida’s schooling bass but the ones I pointed out were consistent.
I have to say I have never, ever, experienced a day – actually a day and a half – when the smallmouth relentlessly schooled and attacked from morning to evening. It was spectacular. If only it had happened for Rowland during the blasted tournament.