Benchwarmers
Obscure lures provoke bass in southeast Arkansas
ARKANSAS COUNTY — Who says it’s too hot to fish?
I’ve said it a time or two this summer, but I recanted Thursday when two friends invited me to fish a cypress-studded reservoir in southeast Arkansas.
The temperature was in the high 90s at noon when we hit the water, and the humidity was more than 70 percent. A few puffy clouds were no match for a glaring sun, but a steady breeze offered slight relief.
As usual, I brought far more gear than was appropriate for a small aluminum fishing boat. The array included a 20-quart cooler, four rods and reels, a Pelican camera case and three tackle boxes, two of which are superfluous because I only use a very small selection of lures.
I need all that superfluous stuff though, because a situation sometimes calls for an obscure item that I’ve not used before. On Thursday, two such items produced the best bass fishing trip of the year.
My friends wanted to fish for crappie, so they took one boat to one of their secret crappie honey holes that was safe from the prying eyes of a nosy reporter.
Of course, that meant I had an entire bass population to myself.
I started at a small grassy island ringed by cypress trees. With a medium-light action spinning reel, I immediately caught my first largemouth bass on the second cast with a small swimbait. A couple of casts later, a substantially larger bass broke my 8-pound test line on the hookset.
“That’s what you get for using a puppy leash to tame lions,” I thought to myself.
I had no other comparable swimbait, but I needed something soft and slender with a retracted hook to navigate the duckweed, shallow brush and cypress knees without snagging.
In a neglected side compartment of one tacklebox I found a candidate, a Sebile Magic Swimmer, a soft plastic swimbait that’s not exactly jointed, but cut in reticulated fashion so that the body undulates when in motion. The color was smoke with silver flake.
The man himself, Patrick Sebile, showed me personally how to “feesh ze Mahjeek SvimAIR” at the 2012 Bassmaster Classic in Tulsa. I got several packs at that time, but I only used it once, unsuccessfully, at the 2017 FLW tournament at Beaver Lake where I competed as a co-angler.
I tied a Magic Swimmer to a heavy-action spinning rig and immediately got a tremendous strike. The fish did not bite the lure close enough to the head to encounter the hook. Instead, it bit the lure in two and escaped unscathed.
This was a problem because the Magic Swimmer comes in packs of four. My meager supply of something so fragile would not last long if subjected to that kind of abuse.
That was my last strike in that spot, so I moved to another spot that my friend Worth Gibson showed me during a previous visit two years ago. I quickly noticed that the big spinning reel is ill suited to eliciting the proper action from Magic Swimmer. The only way to make the lure act right is by twitching and jerking it like a traditional jerkbait.
I pitched to a trio of cypress knees on a bend and immediately caught a football-shaped bass weighing about 2½ pounds. I caught another just like it, which ruined a second Magic Swimmer. I caught a third and a fourth. These fish looked so much alike that I suspected they all might have been the same fish, so I put the last one on ice, partially in retaliation for destroying my third Magic Swimmer. I was down to one.
I joined my mates uplake for a visit and some cold refreshment.
“Caught any?” I asked. “A few,” was their deadpan reply.
They tilted their cooler forward to show off an admirable number of slab crappie.
We fished together at a levee, but that wasn’t Magic Swimmer country, so I turned to an old favorite, the Yum Craw Papi in watermelon/ red flake. It was once my best smallmouth bass bait, but I haven’t used it in years.
My friends decided to return to their crappie haunts. No sooner were they out of sight when the Craw Papi found a taker. The ruler on my cooler is only 15 inches long, but this fish far exceeded that to the tune of about 19-20 inches, which translates to about 5-6 pounds.
I caught a few small bass and was considering leaving when clouds darkened the sky. The wind gusted and blew in a slight drizzle. Bass began hammering prey on the shore, and I picked up two more keeper largemouths before the sky cleared and the activity ceased.
I returned to my original hotspot and caught two more bass, but the second fish destroyed my last Magic Swimmer.
By then, fish were busting the surface in thick cover. I saw one make a tremendous splash on the other side of a cypress knee barricade, so I turned to another unused benchwarmer.
It’s a Live Target Hollow Body Sunfish in Natural Pumpkinseed color. It’s similar to a plastic frog, with the same integrated hook arrangement. It hits the water with a hollow plop, and it wobbles on the surface like a crippled bream when you twitch the rod tip.
I cast to the other side of the cypress knees. I grumbled and muttered because the line draped across the top of a knee. That would likely compromise the lure’s action, but worse, it would probably snap the line if a good fish struck.
I retrieved the lure in a walk-the-dog fashion, like a Zara Spook. It was almost to the cypress knee when a bass struck so hard that it looked like somebody had thrown a boulder in the water.
Miraculously, the strike jerked the line off the cypress knee, and I wrestled the day’s final bass, a strapping 3-pounder, to the boat.
I reached under my shades and brushed beads of sweat away from my eyes. When fishing is that good, the heat doesn’t seem so bad.