Tick, tick, tick, tick, tick. That’s what I hear almost constantly in the back of my head right now.
No matter how well I’ve used my time in the offseason, I never feel like I have enough hours in the day when it comes to this time of year. Every time I look at the clock, it seems like a whole day flashed by, but that’s always what it’s like in these final stages of preparing for the GEICO Bassmaster Classic and the Bassmaster Elite Series regular season.
You want to know what I’ve been doing for 12 hours a day for the last two weeks?
I’ve looked through every single compartment of every single box of tackle I plan to bring on the road this season. I’m also: hand tying my jig skirts; making my own shakey heads; hand tying my hair jigs; tying fluorocarbon keepers/bait-holders on all of my hooks – hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of them.
I try to go through all my tackle, piece by piece. It’s not an easy, pleasant job – the terminal tackle alone takes me like three or four days – and I have to admit, it probably sounds like madness. But for me, it’s necessary madness. There’s no other way for me to function the way I do throughout an eight-month Elite Series season unless I put ridiculous amounts of time into my tackle this time of year.
My critical preseason gear: a jig vise
What is one of my most important pieces of gear this time of year? My jig vise. I use a jig vise a lot. I used to work for a jig company, Ambusher Lures – actually, that was my very first job back in high school – and over the years, I may have tied 10,000 jigs. I’m pretty good with a jig vise, but I spend literally days at a time hunched over that thing.
People may have seen videos over the years of the process I go through in putting keepers/bait holders on my hooks. I cut the keeper off every one of my worm hooks and tie on my own keepers because they hold the head of the worm up the hook better. I used to use the individual wire shafts of brush guards as my keepers, but in the past few years I’ve switched to heavy (45- to 60-pound) fluorocarbon line that I cut into tiny little pieces, pinch over and then tie onto the shank of each hook with a spindle and bobbin loaded with braid.
I’m not going to lie, it’s a total pain, and I go through this process literally hundreds of times. But, I come out of the process with better keepers on all my hooks.
I do surgery on all of my shakey heads, too. I’ll put a shakey head in the vise and cut the stock hook off so there’s still about 1/3 of an inch of the shank left. Next I replace that hook with a Gamakatsu heavy-cover finesse hook, which I use about 90 percent of the time I’m fishing a tournament. I basically attach that hook to the 1/3-inch shank of my original shakey head and come out with the best shakey head you can imagine.
I learned how to do that when I was a kid back in California fishing saltwater a lot. We’d get these jigs that came with crappy cadmium hooks and replace those hooks with good Gamakatsu hooks. I follow that same process I learned 25 years ago with all of my shakey head hooks.
Hair, feather and silicone, too
My hair jigs are pretty basic. I use SPRO jigheads I already have and just make them prettier with a little hair/feather combination. They’re pretty generic, but I add a little accent color here and there – maybe throw in a little chartreuse – and come out with what I think is a pretty good hair jig.
The jig skirts are another story.
I swear, I have 50 pounds of silicone and live-rubber skirt materials in 25 different colors, and some years I go through what seems like 1,000 skirts. Sometimes you can lose 30 of them a day jigging rip rap. In the past, I’ve tied my jig skirts during the season, but I spent several days this winter with my head buried in skirt material, cutting and figuring out precise thicknesses and colors, and then banding all of my skirts.
Making jig skirts is the definition of “not fun,” but I really feel like I’m on top of it this year.
I have a pretty specific reason for spending all this time working on these tiny little details before the season starts: I want to sleep and run more during a tournament week. Last year, I spent way too much time tying skirts during tournaments, and that was part of the reason I’d stay up until 2 a.m. every night working on my tackle.
That clock keeps ticking. I have plenty more to do before I leave home and head to Oklahoma for the Classic. I better get back to it!