How do you make a good thing even better? Double it up! That's what we've done with Yamamoto Craws and Lizards. For your fishing success, crawdads and lizards (3 series and 13 series) now come in these two-tone laminate colors:
900 - Black back / red belly (red shad)
901 - Watermelon back / white belly
904 - Black back / blue belly
919 - Green pumpkin with black flake back / lemon belly
Most things bass eat are not monotones but have two tones. Most all life sports primary darker colors on their backs and secondary paler colors underneath. The correct term for this is countershading, characterized by darker coloring of areas exposed to light and lighter coloring of areas that are normally shaded. When it comes to countershaded fishing lures, most anglers intuitively go for white or pale bellies in lures that imitate baitfish. Yet the color scheme does not stop at baitfish. Most aquatic crustaceans, amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals have white or pale undersides, including craws and lizards. Look at the back of your own hand. It's darker than your palm. The leaves of most trees,
bushes or flowers are darker on their top side than underneath the leaf. This is Nature's universal theme for most flora and fauna - darker back, lighter underside. In other words, it's truly a laminate-colored world outdoors - and underwater. Not only baitfish, but most everything a bass eats is naturally laminated. It's the color scheme to entice them with Yamamoto's laminated craws and lizards now too.
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Bassdozer says: "I prefer the flat bottom of a stand-up style jig for flipping, pitching and skipping back under cover. The stand-up design is my jig of choice in heavy cover where bass love to hide. Many other jig styles will roll over or lay on their side when they land, especially with a big trailer. Laying on their side is often what gets jig heads snagged too! Snags happen because the jig flips on its side in cover and gets caught. The stand up style jig has the center of gravity at the bottom of the head, so it lands upright. It's harder to snag the hook point straight up dead center. Also, the center of gravity is back on the wide flat belly. So it falls horizontally belly-first rather than nose-first through
thick weeds, tree limbs and bushes. Belly first means it drops more weedless and snagless. And there is absolutely no crevice where weeds or debris can lodge underneath the hook eye and foul the nose of the jig"
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"All our laminates work swell," says Russ Bassdozer. What more can you say about the bass appeal of a black/red craw or black/blue lizard? The first Yamamoto products to be laminated in spring 2001 were Senkos. The top laminate colors in Senkos: 900, 901 and 904 now come in the craws and lizards also. Yet brand new color 919 (green pumpkin back / lemon belly), designed exclusively for the craws and lizards, has proven to be the hottest of the hot for me lately.
I pinch an inch off the 919 craw to make a trailer for a 3/8 to 1/2 oz brown/green rubber jig. As I run down a shoreline, I pitch and flip the laminated jig with 919 craw into pockets, cuts, chunk rock beds, trees, weed and brush banks - all cover that's shoreline-oriented and shallow. Primarily ten feet deep or less. Key here is I pinpoint my jig presentation to specific visible targets I can see. Drop the jig on the exact bulls-eye and expect to get bit right away. These locations are the havens of largemouth bass.
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Bassdozer says: "Brand new color 919 (green pumpkin back / lemon belly), designed exclusively for the craws and lizards, has been the hottest of the hot for me lately."
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As I run down the shoreline and it juts out to a deeper point or drops off to a ledge, I grab the rod with the laminate 919 lizard, rigged Carolina style with a Mojo Rockhopper sinker. As the water deepens, the graph LCD becomes my "eyes" for where to shotgun cast with the lizard. In lakes that have good numbers of both largemouth and smallmouth, you will get mostly largemouth in the shallow bowls on the jig and mostly smallmouth on the deeper points with the lizard.
These are two baits that work together well. A jig-and-craw for targeting shallow shoreline cover, and a Carolina-rigged lizard for searching out deeper away from the cover. I use an identical rod, reel and line set-up for both presentations, a pair of Yamamoto heavy action Mod IV rods with 16 to 20 lb test Sugoi fluorocarbon line.
Most everything a bass eats is laminated by Nature. Now some of the world's finest craw and lizard imitations are laminated by Yamamoto.
We are all artists when we pick up a rod, and what we tie on the end is our paintbrush. So tie on the universal paint job of life with a Yamamoto laminate craw and lizard today.
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