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Tryin' Something New
By Gary Dobyns

March/April 2003 Issue

It’s good to try new things once in a while, but it can be hard to do. You always seem to want to go with your confidence baits, and for me that’s usually rip baits and spinnerbaits. The US Angler’s Choice Yamamoto tournament at California’s Lake Oroville forced me to try a few baits that I wouldn’t normally throw, and as a result, now I have a few more items in my arsenal.

Oroville was super low at tournament time – about 200 feet down. The launch went surprisingly smooth anyway, thanks to a good tournament crew. In the weeks before the Yamamoto tournament, it was only taking about nine pounds to win a tournament at Oroville, and eight pounds would have gotten you in the money.

At the Yamamoto tournament, though, there were fifteen limits over nine pounds, and three over ten. Dave Rush and I finished second with 10.71, and Calvin and Jan Fredrick took first with a whopping 13.33, which is excellent for five fish at Oroville any time of year.

Only Yamamoto soft baits were allowed in this unique tournament format, so I was forced to start the tournament with plastics. It was a really weird experience for me - not starting out the day with one of my more aggressive techniques. I had pre-fished quite a bit, and the bite was so good it was just plain fun.I wanted to develop confidence in these new baits, and some of the old ones as well.

I’ve never really been a big tube fisherman, and although I used to throw a ton of grubs, for some reason I had kind of gotten away from them, too. But at Oroville we started out fishing the 5-inch super grub (colors 194, 297, and 187) and the 3½ -inch tubes (colors 1 and 30).

We were rigging both the tubes and the grubs on little dart-heads, just swimming them down the bank.The lake hadn’t even turned over yet, so it was a typical fall pattern. We caught a ton of fish on the tubes and grubs fairly shallow, and we also caught a bunch on Hula Grubs rigged on 3/8 and ½-ounce football head jigs.

We’d just work the grub or tube down the bank, fishing it right along the bottom. One thing that really surprised me was how well the little craws worked rigged on dart-heads. I’m used to putting them on jigs as a trailer, but I was fishing them down the bank on a dart head and just slaying the bass. My best craws were the 3¾ -inch, in colors 236 and 297.

There were fish scattered all over the bank, so we did a lot of hopping around, hitting hot spots. The lake had been dropping at a pretty good rate – about half a foot per day, so there were a lot of fish on points. We’d pull up to a spot, make a few casts, and if we didn’t catch a fish, we’d leave.

There were a lot of suspended fish, too, but why bother with those when you can catch them on the bank and they were the same size anyway? With it being late fall and pond smelt being the main forage in the lake, there was a deep bite going, too. We also threw some Hula Grubs down to about twenty feet, but deeper than that we switched to a drop-shot rig. The bite was pretty much wide open, and everyone had their own idea of what the best pattern would be.

This tournament was the first time I had ever used any of the Yamamoto cut tail worms, and I was truly surprised and impressed by them. We were fishing the 4-inch ones on drop-shot rigs down to fifty feet deep, and we had a lot of success with daiquiri (237), pearl blue with black flake (239), and a smoke pearl blue (240).

I like a #2 Gamakatsu drop-shot hook, and I was just nose-hooking the cut-tail worms on the hook tied about eight to ten inches above a 1/4-ounce weight. We’d just barely shake them, and we caught most of our better drop shot fish at around 30 to 50 feet. Now that I’ve found out how good the little cut-tail worms are, I’m looking forward to using the new 6½-inch ones.

As it turned out, not being able to start out the morning with my usual reaction baits actually did me a favor. I’ve got a couple of new confidence baits now, including the cut-tail worms, the little craws, and the tubes.  So now I’ve got a few more things to stack in my boat…as if I didn’t have enough already. Honestly, I don’t think we would have caught a better limit of fish even if I’d been able to use my usual go-to baits. My advice is: try something new now and then. You may be very pleasantly surprised, just like I was.

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