Friend’s long forgotten gizmo salvages fishing

I met Billy Ray Hocutt in 1992 at the Golden Blend Diamond Invitational World Bass Fishing Championship at Tuscaloosa, Ala.

Hocutt, a former Tuscaloosa police officer, was an avid angler who wrote a fishing column for the Tuscaloosa News. He was loud, opinionated, bellicose and confrontational, but that was all a front to deflect attention away from a heart that was bigger than all of Alabama. He died of cancer in 2009, the same year I was diagnosed with the same.

The Golden Blend invitationals were Red Man’s attempt to compete with BASS. The world championship paid $150,000, plus a Chevy truck valued at $15,000. It was the richest bass tournament at that time, as the Bassmaster Classic only paid $50,000. Red Man, which operated under aegis of Operation Bass, eventually morphed into FLW.

The big BASS stars fished the Golden Blends, but so did a lot of ordinary guys, including a 19-year old from Missouri named Mike Boyles. I was his observer when he tore a hunk from his Subway sandwich and put it on a hook to try to catch a big catfish that was finning around a brush pile.

Boyles and I still stay in close touch, and he swears he doesn’t remember the catfish incident. He doesn’t seem to much appreciate it when I bring it up, either.

I also rode with another angler named Carl Maxfield, a South Carolinian who died of heart disease in 2003. Mark Davis of Mount Ida adopted Maxfield’s children and raised them as his own.

Among the press corps was the loud, obnoxious and utterly delightful Hocutt. He invented a gizmo that allowed you to run a line through the body of a soft-plastic bait and tail rig it with a treble hook. The device looked like a really long surgical needle with a stainless steel insert and a protective plastic sleeve. Thread the needle the length of the lure and then remove the insert, which prevents plastic from clogging the needle. Run the line through the needle, pull the terminal end through the rear of the bait, attach the hook and remove the needle.

It works best on swimbaits that have a recessed belly. You can bury one barb of the treble hook in the recess so that the other two barbs are flush with the body.

Billy Ray was convinced this thing was going to make him rich, and he gave me one for field testing. The first time I used it was at Lake Ouachita with an early swimbait called a Fin-S. My first cast caught a largemouth bass that weighed nearly 5 pounds. No hookset was necessary. All you had to do was lift your rod and reel in the slack.

The problem with that rig is that it tends to hook fish deep, which increases the chance of injuring a fish. I put it away after that summer and haven’t used it since.

I took my son Matthew and daughter Amy to Lake Norfork last weekend to chase some magnum smallmouth bass. The water was high and covered a lot of shoreline trees and bushes that are normally on dry ground. I was convinced we could catch fish from the shallow cover with soft-plastic frogs, but we didn’t get a sniff.

I also brought an old tackle box that I haven’t opened since the early 1990s. It is full of crankbaits, topwaters and soft-plastics lures that are long out of production. It also contained, to my surprise, Billy Ray’s needle device. I had forgotten I had it, and it might be the only one left on the planet.

Also in the box was an assortment of Eiland Fish Heads. That’s a local obscurity from a Shreveport lure maker that I got when I was in Shreveport doing a Bassmaster article that introduced the world to a phenomenal new fishery on the Red River. Oh, if you could see my photos of the Red from that era, when “The Jungle” really was The Jungle!

Anyway, half of the Fish Head looks like a fat plastic worm. The back half is molded in the shape of a tiny bluegill. It was designed for jigging among the vast rafts of floating timber that once covered the Red River backwaters. Again, I might have the only ones in existence.

With Billy Ray’s device, I rigged a weightless Fish Head with a treble hook and cast it to the outside edges of the bushes. It sank slowly, like molasses in oil. It was the only thing that caught fish.

I touched the bill of my cap and tipped it, John Wayne style, to the sky.

I could have sworn I heard a wild, cackling laugh of approval.