Tell the truth? Not tournament fishermen
Without a doubt the father-and-son team of the Randy McAbee Sr. and Randy Jr. of Bakersfield have taken the bass tournament fishing scene by storm.
This duo wins just about every team tournament they fish and the recent Angler”s Choice Team Tournament of Champions (TOC) held at Clear Lake was no exception. They just blew away the rest of the field.
In the past 12 months they have won four bass boats at Clear Lake. The boats are worth an estimated value of more than $150,000. The remarkable fact is they only fish Clear Lake three or four times a year and only prefished one day for this last tournament, yet they have the lake wired in regard to locating big bass and catching them.
How do they do it? That”s the question many fishermen have been asking.
There have been rumors — and I”ll say they”re just rumors — on the technique the McAbees used to catch their big bass.
As the rumor mill goes, the McAbees only fish what are called “community holes,” which means they are fishing in the same areas that dozens of other anglers fish — mostly rockpiles and rock ledges.
The rumor is that they are using long (7 ?-foot) casting rods rigged with 8-pound test line. Their lure is a Norman DD Series, a $6 lure that is a deep-running crankbait. They use the light line in order to get the lure down deep. They make a long cast and leave the bail of the reel open and use the trolling motor to move the boat a long distance from the lure, which spools out more line.
Typically a casting reel can hold up to 100 yards of line. Fishermen push the rod down into the water up to the reel and start to crank. All this supposedly causes the lure to dive down to a depth of 20-25 feet, where it bangs on the bottom. It is well known that big bass prefer the deeper water and this technique puts the lure down in the strike zone.
During the recent Angler”s Choice TOC, Randy McAbee Sr. said he and his son caught more than 40 fish on the first day of the tournament and more than 20 on the second day.
Now the big question is did they use the technique mentioned above? As always when dealing with bass tournament fishermen, very little information is given out. In other words the successful fishermen religiously guard their secrets. In fact, many successful fishermen will put a new lure on the rod and leave the rod on the deck of the boat during the weigh-in process just to confuse their competitors.
I have always said the CIA should hire bass tournament fishermen as their agents. If captured they would never reveal any secrets regardless of the torture used.
I always remember years ago when I was the director of the Record-Bee/Bruno”s Team Bass Tournament. The tournament always took place in February and one year, when it was colder than normal, I interviewed the winning team and asked them how they caught their fish. They looked me straight in the eye and said they caught all their bass using plastic frogs cast to the weed mats. Now everyone knows there are no weed mats on the lake in February.
The big question about the McAbees is that if their technique is so successful, why haven”t other fishermen adopted it? In most cases it takes several years for tournament fishermen to adopt new techniques.
The popular swimbait is a good example. The first swimbaits were manufactured in Southern California and were hard lures made by AC PLUG. They were manufactured in a garage and were a crude affair that were painted to resemble trout. The Southern California lakes were known to hold huge bass and they also were stocked with trout. The bass readily fed on the planted trout. The AC Plugs were deadly on those trophy-sized bass.
Later swimbaits were made of soft plastic and became easier to cast and retrieve. One of the the first fisherman to use in a swimbait in Clear Lake was Brian Velvick. He won several major tournaments on the lake using nothing but swimbaits.
Today they are one of the more popular lures used at Clear Lake and there are dozens of manufacturers.
New techniques and lures come and go and what works one year may not necessarily work the next. Every fisherman hopes he stumbles on the secret lure or technique. Of course, that doesn”t always come true.
That”s why they call it fishing.
