®
Summer 2020
By Pete Robbins
ER GIANTS
T
he longtime Lake Amistad guide and current
Bassmaster Elite Series pro spends more
time outdoors than all but a handful of people on earth and the only time he’s not chasing gigantic
largemouth is either when he’s hunting or when he’s
fishing a tournament on a waterway that doesn’t have
them.
He can crank, flip a jig and has plenty of experience
with big swimbaits, but surprisingly many of his true
monsters have come on the surface.
“I’ve probably caught more over 10 pounds on a
topwater than I have on a swimbait,” he said.
The fascination was born early. Growing up in Del
Rio, he had a childhood friend whose father was a
striper guide. They’d tag along with him, throwing
7-inch Cordell Red Fins, but “every time we’d go
we’d catch two or three 6- or 8- or 10-pound
bass.”
That lit a fire under him that led to several
30-pound tournament bags with that same
technique. Indeed, that wake bait in bone or
rainbow trout remains one of his key big bass
presentations decades later.
His other favorite topwater for giants is the Strike
King Mega Dawg, a 6-inch, 2 ounce walk-the-dog style
topwater. He’d fished similar baits like the Lunker
Punker prior to the Mega Dawg’s development, but
found them hard to work all day, so he begged
Strike King lure designer Phil Marks for this lure.
“It especially good in rough water,” he
said, noting that he favors the “Oyster” color
scheme. Because it casts like a bullet and
walks with comparatively less effort, he’s
more inclined to throw it from start to
finish when he knows that’s his best
chance for a monster – or five monsters.
Hanselman typically has both of
these key lures on the deck during prime
windows and switches back and forth
until he figures out which one the fish
want. The only qualifications for using them
is that the lake has to be relatively clear and
it has to have big ones. If there’s a bluegill spawn
going on, that’s prime time, and a “big topwater bait will bring out the kid in them.”
Wind is often better, but if it’s calm, he’ll just push out a little deeper. The Mega Dawg typically will trigger fish to come up out of 10- to 15-feet of water to blast it, but in ultra-clear water with little wind, they may rocket up out of 25. In that scenario, he looks for fish that are relating to submerged grass or those that are suspended in deep trees. In some instances, the fish aren’t relating to any cover at all.
“Sometimes I’ll be running 70 mph and I’ll see a big gizzard shad sick on the surface, walking on the top,” he stated. “I’ll always stop. It might be over 100-feet of water, but there’s usually a big bass hanging around, and they know that if they eat that they won’t have eat for a week.”
He said that on bluegill lakes the bite is typically better when the sun is high and beating down.
“That’s when the bluegills are active, out and about, and those big ones have their radar up and pinging,” he said. “I like 10 a.m. to 2 p.m.”
Credit FLW
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