People who know me pretty much know that I fish plastics almost exclusively when I hit open water for crappies and panfish. In spite of all the positives I could recite regarding plastics, the world of plast does have one drawback for me: if I’ve had success with it, its hard for me to throw it out. That gets to be a burden on available space in my tackle closet.
When I was introduced to plastics, it was in a subtle….well, humbling….sort of way. I was fishing one morning with minnows and came across this old black fella shorefishing and quite obviously hung up on a log in the bay I was working. This guy had been catching non-stop as I watched him from a distant shore and as I worked around the bay had decided to swing wide to allow him his room. Then he hung his rig. He asked if I’d paddle over there and get his jig off the limb he was working as it was his last one. I did as he asked and got to see what he had on. It was a purple tube with clear glitter legs and he was fishing it under a float. I asked where he got the plastic and he mentioned his source. On my way home from the lake that day I stopped and picked a package of the tubes up along with some heads to slip inside. The next day I was back on the water with the tubes and found that the minnows that came along were only in the way. Thus began a love affair with plastics.
My approach to fishing themn was to stock myself with every color in the Bass Pro Catalog X 2. That was a major purchase and yielded a ton of tubes. Secondarily I decided to use nothing but tubes that entire open water season to give myself a chance to really learn about them. Trust me, I had quite a few fishless days that summer. Frustration levels ran high often. Then I decided to document each and every fish caught on each and every outing. It was funny how for about eighteen years I did more writing than actual fishing, but it paid off for me. It didn’t take long to begin to see some paralelles that helped piece together parts to the puzzle that the fish held.
I still have my original tackle satchel and inside are 4 planos full of some of the original order from Bass Pro. If I am not mistaken, BP claimed to have 101 colors in the 1.5″ crappie tubes and it only took 1 year to figure out that only about five or six caught fish with any degree of consistancy. Still, these plastics and that satchel represented at least a portion of the success I was having and , well, I just couldn’t see fit to get rid of it.
The other day I was doing some closet diving and found a package of some tubes that were my all-time favorite color of Heavy Glitter Purple with Chartreuse legs. These are 1.5″ tubes and still available in many places. One thing led to another and lo, what should happen but I find them in my current over-load of every concievable plastic BUT a tube. Actually I rigged a rod with one the night before I went fishing last week. Danged if they didn’t step right up to the task, in spite of the years of inactivity.
New products come along that capture our attention. New color schemes pop up thattrip our trigger as well as the fish’s. Our fishing techniques become more refined and we slowly slip away from the roots that took us to fishing success, but why? I know I am guilty of having done this and even more recent tackle products. Flick Tails are a plastic that I carry in three colors and two sizes to this very day, but seldom use them even while knowing that they are an outstanding “sumo sunfish” plastic. Mini Mites are another plastic that I have tons of in all kinds of colors, yet they don’t get tied on as often as they should in spite of their alluring tail action.
Last Thursday as I was catching fish on an “old” bait I got to thinking about how much I may have been missing by not at least considering using some of these long ago favorites. I don’t think the fish have evolved enough to not like hitting these anymore, I think I have simply found new ways to approach the fish and probablt am just too lazy to step back and try something that had its own heyday. I’m going to try hard to get rid of this short sightedness this summer. Many of my old by-gone plastic favorites were darned good “heat of the summer” producers not all that many years ago. One such tube has a hot orange forward section with hot pink legs….damned ugly looking apparition but in deep water fished vertically when the summer heat is really cranked this animal was exactly that, an animal. Why? Who knows. I had my most outstanding success with this creature in water as deep as 33 feet and would smoke crappies when others were scratching their heads. I have no idea how I let this one go past me.
Time catches up with all of us and sometimes we lose sight of the fact that what worked ten years back probably works as good today IF we were to take the time to step away from the comfort zone and make the time to tie one on a line. Its crazy how this has become a conscious decision making thing. The humbling part of all this is that time doesn’t really change the tackle, it changes the angler. While it may become a pain for room in the boat, that third bag, the long ago parked in the closet bag, is going to go fishing again. Yes, there are things in there that will be gotten rid of, but those plastics are going to get wet once again when things don’t look so good for the new and improved
