(Editor's note: The following is the latest installment in a series of fishing tips presented by The Bass University. Check back each Friday for a new tip.)
Traveling the country fishing tournaments, Bass University instructor Dave Mansue has yet to find a lake that doesn’t have some type of wood that holds bass. It could be laydowns, stumps, docks, standing timber or some other form of natural or manmade cover, and it’s not always the obvious stuff that produces best. He moved from suburban New Jersey to Toledo Bend, which is chock full of standing timber, and then stood amazed as his friend Denny Brauer won a major tournament there by targeting boat docks.
If you’re around big fish and gnarly cover, you’re going to need to flip with heavy tackle. Mansue, who admits that he’s “vertically challenged,” uses a 7 1/2-foot CastAway Invicta flipping stick as his default choice. Not only is it light, powerful and sensitive, but it features Winn Grips that won’t slip out of your hand in any weather. He pairs it with a 7.1:1 gear ratio baitcasting reel from Lew’s. The speed is critical as you’ll alternately need to catch up with fish running toward you and winch away from the cover those fish trying to bulldog away from you. Most importantly, he’s right handed, so he wants to reel with his left (non-power) hand.
“I do not want the rod to leave my hand," he said, noting that many fish hit a flipping bait on the way down and immediate hook sets are critical. He spools his reel with either 20- to 25-pound Vicious fluorocarbon or 50- to 65-pound Vicious braid. With the latter line, he colors the last 4 or 5 feet black with a non-fading marker.
While Mansue admits that flipping-bait choice is “a personal thing,” there are several go-to selections in his arsenal. The first two are the Missile Baits D-Bomb and Baby D-Bomb. What he likes about these are that the bait’s appendages are behind the main body of the bait, so they follow the bait through the cover rather than getting hung up.
Another favorite is the Yamamoto Senko – 5 inches in many fisheries, but 6 or even 7 inches when around Texas-sized bass – rigged Texas-style with a pegged weight. “You can get the Senko through anything,” he said, and furthermore you can go behind anglers flipping more aggressive offerings and clean up what they leave behind.
No matter what you’re flipping, he urges you to vary fall rates with different weights and change bait styles and colors on occasion. Even if you’re catching fish, don’t get complacent – make wise adjustments to catch bigger fish.
He has two main hooks that command the majority of his flips. The first is a Daiichi 5/0 offset wide-gap model. He says the Daiichi is “the sharpest hook in the world,” and while it’s stout, it’s not so heavy as to alter the natural shimmy of the Senko. When he goes to the larger Senko, however, or to his creature-style baits, he prefers a Mustad Ultra Point grip pin extreme Denny Brauer hook. It’s very heavy diameter with a very sharp point and the keeper is soldered onto the hook. Furthermore, while many straight shank hooks work better when tied on with a snell knot, Brauer specifically designed this one to work just as well with an easier-to-tie Palomar knot. That’ll save you time when you make the wise decision to retie between bites.
If you want to know more about Mansue's shortcuts for patterning fish on laydowns, bushes, docks, stumps and cypress trees, check out his full video seminar about strategies for fishing wood cover, available only by subscribing to The Bass University TV.
