I remember 8th grade like it was yesterday. The only problem is there are a lot of things about 8th grade that I don’t want to remember. Toughskin jeans are a great example. While everybody else was walking around in Jordache jeans, I looked like an old Sears ad from the 1970s.
By the time I convinced my dad to buy me a pair of designer jeans with a horse head on the back pocket, everybody else had moved on to jeans with those stinking Girbaud tags on the fly.
That’s the story of my life, though — wrong label at the wrong time and on the wrong side.
The problem with trends is that just as soon as most of us catch up with them, the trendsetters have already moved on to something else. The rest of us are relegated to wandering the world in bellbottoms and parachute pants trying to figure out why everybody is laughing.
Trends have a way of filtering into every aspect of our lives. They cling to our clothing. They take over our television sets. And they even hook on to our hobbies. Don’t think so? Check out all those Helicopter Lures and Banjo Minnows in your shed, and get back with me.
Trends abound in the world of outdoor sports, and there’s no trendier sport than bass fishing. Anglers constantly try to stay on the cutting edge to get one up on the competition.
Sometimes, what comes out dies just as quickly as it started — Dance’s Eel anyone? However, some trends become solidified in the soul of bass fishing forevermore.
Two fanatical bass anglers who have to stay abreast of the latest trends are Lonnie Stanley and Randy Howell.
Stanley, the owner of Stanley Jigs and former Bassmasters Classic qualifier, has to stay up-to-date on the latest bass trends so he can offer lures that maximize their potential.
Howell, a BASS Elite Series champion and former Classic qualifier, has to stay up-to-date so he can continue to catch fish and cash checks.
Some of the most recent trends these pros have witnessed are shaky-head worms, drop-shots and the swimming-style jigs most commonly referred to as chatter baits. These trends have stuck, and they are still as productive today as they were at their inception.
Stanley and Howell see some new trends on the horizon that they think stand a chance of sticking. Some are new, and some, like bellbottoms, are new twists on old favorites.
Football jigs
“These jigs have been around 20 years,” said Stanley. “We were using them in the 1984 U.S. Open at Lake Mead. We brought them back to Sam Rayburn and Toledo Bend, and discovered that they were great on the outside edges of the bushes.”
While the football jig itself isn’t anything new, Stanley said the way anglers are starting to fish the jig and apply it to different situations makes it one of the top trends for 2008. The primary reason for the shift to football jigheads is the lack of water in the local lakes and reservoirs.
According to Stanley, low water has kept fish out of the typical shallow-water cover like flooded buck brush, and it has pushed them out to open-water cover like the outside grass edges, humps and drop-offs. Football jigs excel when bass aren’t holed up in the thick stuff.
While the low water has brought the football jig into the limelight, the craving of anglers to try something different is forcing them to try these jigs in sparse shallow-water stuff as well.
“A football-head jig like the Stanley Bug Eye Jig isn’t designed to go through grass and brush,” said Stanley. “In other words, it’s not something I would be throwing in 4 feet of water on Toledo Bend or Black Lake. Where a football jig shines is when you can jerk it up and let it settle back down. It stays in one place longer (than other jighead styles).”
The key to finding good water for fishing a football jig, according to Stanley, is looking for edges. The edges of brush, grass edges, channel drops, the edges of humps and even the edges of wooden cover like piers and docks.
“One thing the Bugeye Jig will do that other jigs can’t is stand straight up off the bottom,” Stanley explained. “It’s kind of like fishing a shaky head with the worm sticking straight up off the bottom. A football jig with some kind of trailer will do the same thing.”
According to Stanley, anglers looking to shake things up in shallow water can tie on a heavy football jig and throw it around cypress trees that don’t have a lot of cover around them. The big jig will crawl around the cypress knees and knock off the wood with a vengeance, often drawing aggressive strikes from nearby bass.
Click here to read the rest of this article, which first appeared in the January 2008 issue of Louisiana Sportsman.
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