A LONG JOURNEY : T HE E QUIPMENT T RAIL of
By George Kramer
WESTERN BASS ANGLING
Pete Gardner and Bill Smith discuss what had become an advanced method for a time, fishing spoons on Colorado River lakes like Mohave.
Advances in electronics from companies like Lowrance helped soft plastic fishermen like Joe Mazzurco find feeding bass.
Gary Klein with a fish caught on the Poe’s Super Cedar plug in 1984 at Sam Rayburn, Texas. Poe’s was one of the first Western hard baits.
iscussing the tackle, lures and equipment of the formative years of Western bass fishing is like gazing at the summer sky and focusing on one particular cloud. The exercise becomes almost fruitless, for by the time you try to contemplate its color or shape or contrast, within minutes that vaporous billow has moved or reconfigured. Then, take that same ground-to-sky perspective and multiply it by the views of a thousand different witnesses and it’s so hard to reach a consensus.
You just can’t go year-by-year with tackle or equipment introductions, especially in the beginning, because Western anglers with vary- ing interests were introduced to bass fishing in different settings and at unique moments. We didn’t all encounter fluorescent line, naturalized crankbaits or flasher sonars in quite the same way. And due to the “closed” nature of region- al information at the time, what was common in one place was a total curiosity in another. All I can hope to do here is throw out some things, and see if they stimulate your remembrances. After all, our fishing experi- ences may be a lot of things—but mostly they’re personal.
34 SILVER EAGLES _ July 2011
D
REELS
In the beginning, there was spinning. Maybe not for all, but in the 1970’s bass boom, the great conversion was away from conventional tackle used in saltwater an- gling or the spinning gear associated with most of the freshwater/trout scene. True, everybody comes from somewhere, but that introduction to the curious red, levelwind from Abu Garcia became a virtual badge of courage—like getting your hand stamped for entrance into bass fishing world. For me that was around 1970, a couple of years before I joined a bass club. B.A.S.S. probably didn’t have 60,000 subscribers at
the time, but I was nowhere near the well- spring of this key part of bass tackle. After all, the Ambassadeur 5000 was developed as early as 1952 and unveiled at the New York World’s Fair in 1954—a long, long time be- fore we ever knew how much it would matter one day. If memory serves me right, those red reels had a 3:1 gear ratio, probably why I re- call “old timers” at my local lake reeling frantically as they retrieved their wooden Bombers from their wooden rental boats. But as the baitcaster became more and more entrenched, conversion kits to up the speed to 5:1 became available and about the same