Like a lot of us, Brandon Lester is fishing obsessed. So, if you’re trying to track him down between Bassmaster Elite Series tournaments, there’s a pretty good bet you can find him on a local reservoir near his Fayetteville, Tenn., home. Heck, even on a family beach vacation, he still fishes every day.
But if you want to save yourself some trouble locating the Team Toyota pro, just call his sweetheart Kim. She’ll know exactly where he is. “Oh my gosh, it’s 95 degrees here, and no surprise, he’s out in our shop building jig skirts,” she told me during a recent phone call.
Sure enough, on one of 2020’s hottest Friday afternoons, there sat a barefooted and slightly sweaty Lester with a color palette of silicone strands on his lap tinkering to create something summertime schools of heavily pressured largemouth hadn’t seen yet.
“There is no doubt in my mind that playing with custom skirt colors makes a huge difference in getting pressured fish to bite. They have seen all the common colors by mid to late summer,” insists Lester.
“Most of the time, I’m really not a guy who gets too obsessed with lure color. For example, at the Bassmaster Classic back in early March, I was just throwing a plain brown jig because those fish hadn’t seen near as many baits through the winter months. But by late July, schools of fish on places like Guntersville or Kentucky Lake have seen it all, so color becomes super important,” he believes.
Lester began building custom colored jigs a dozen years ago as a college student, and he even used to melt and pour the lead heads himself. But these days he says you can buy the lead heads and hooks as cheap as you can source lead and melt it yourself. Still, he builds custom colored skirts for roughly 75 to 100 football jigs per summer.
“I’ve had days on the water where a buddy was throwing a football jig from the back deck of my boat that was a slightly different color than something more standard I was throwing, and he absolutely beat me like it was my first day on the water, so I know color matters,” Lester says.
He’ll also tell you it’s the minor color accents that make a huge difference in the number of bites he gets, admitting that green pumpkin constitutes the primary color on 85% of the football jigs he throws.
“Another thing I pay close attention to is what color of X Zone soft plastics they’re biting best – and then I’ll build my jig skirts to match that color,” says Lester, who has amassed a highly impressive 34 Top 20 finishes in his young career.
Asked to describe the perfect summer football jig scenario – Lester says he’s typically throwing a 3/4-ounce version on 17-pound Vicious fluorocarbon. He looks for a clean hard bottom on a hump, a channel drop-off, or a roadbed in 12 to 24 feet of water, and he advises brushpiles are far more efficiently probed with sleek Texas rigged worms, not jigs.
“Maybe the custom color skirt thing is all in my head, but I fully believe it makes a difference, and if you believe in what you’re throwing then you’ll fish with more confidence – and confidence is everything in bass fishing,” he concludes.
