Four Lures I Intend to Try at El Salto
Over the last six years Hanna and I have been like clockwork with respect to our Mexican bass trips – heading there each January and then again in May and June. There have been a few outliers, like trips to Picachos last February and November, but generally those have been in addition to, rather than in lieu of, our regularly-scheduled visits.
We’re headed back to El Salto next month, and it’ll be only our visit at that approximate time of year. We went over Halloween in 2015, and had a successful trip, but it was under extremely unusual conditions.
A hurricane was supposed to hit Sinaloa that week, and Anglers Inn owner Billy Chapman Jr. encouraged all scheduled visitors that week to delay their trips, at no penalty. We waffled until the last minute, at which point it became clear that the dangerous part of the storm would miss the lake. There was still plenty of rain, and the lake was over 100% capacity, so Billy still said it was ok to move the trip back, but our schedules were pretty loaded so we ended up going. Hanna, our friend Ray Kawabata and myself were the only three guests at Anglers Inn that week.
The fishing was good, but not great, but nevertheless showed me that it pays to experiment. I always harp on new El Salto visitors to spend at least 80% of their fishing hours using tried-and-true lures, because otherwise your time will simply slip away. That week, though, the regular stuff didn’t fully rise to the occasion.
Hanna caught some quality fish that trip on Storm 4” and 5” Wildeye Shad swimbait, which is one of the longtime El Salto staples, but the best lure for consistent big fish action was a Whopper Plopper 130. I’m pretty sure that almost no one had every thrown one there before because the fish were just plain medieval on that sucker. Every strike was remarkably violent, and I believe every fish was between 4 and 8 pounds. Our guide laughed at it when I first tied it on, but an hour later we were all just sitting there in awe.
Our best lure for numbers on that trip was a 3/8 or ½ ounce Scrounger head with a white or chartreuse Zoom Super Fluke on the back. Nothing fancy, just chuck it out and wind it back and they’d inhale it.
On our last full day of fishing, we took a long ride up the Rio Elota, almost to the point that the hyacinths prevented us from making any more headway. Our guide Chichi had identified a point that was holding a lot of fish, and we caught a bunch with swimbaits and Carolina Rigs. Then the bite D-I-E-D. Dead. We tried everything we could think of, but just couldn’t get them fired up again. Our friend Ray Kawabata was fishing with his guide Eduardo across the way. We invited them in and snickered a little bit when Ray threw out a power dropshot – until he started to catch one fish after another after another. I tried to avoid it, but eventually he offered to rig one up for me, and handed me his rod so he could do that. We’d barely made the transfer when I hooked a fish over 7 pounds. After that it was game on.
The lesson to learn is that there always more and different ways to catch them, whether the bite is wide-open or whether it’s tough. Time is of the essence on vacations that fly by all to quickly, so stick with proven winners most of the time. I still subscribe to an 80/20 rule down there – you should spend no more than 20 percent of your time experimenting with unproven baits – but some experimentation is a good thing.
With that in mind, here are four baits that are packed for November’s trip and will get a workout if the proper conditions present themselves:
Imakatsu Bassroid Swimbait
I’ll be the first one to tell you that I’m far from a big bait expert, but I’ve long had a strong feeling that someone who could dial in that bite in Mexico could reach for various pages in the record book. This one came as a gift from my good friend Alan Clemons, and it’s painted to look like a tilapia. It’s certainly not small at 3 1/8 ounces, and 7 inches (including the tail), but we’ve found plenty of big bass floating down there with tilapia that size or bigger lodged in their throats. If you want to try one, you can buy them from Carolina Fishing Tackle. There are several other models of Bassroid available on the JDM market.
Daiwa Dead or Alive
I first learned about this quirky discontinued surface bait from Ish Monroe, who said it attracts lots of outsized bites, but tends to lose a fair percentage of them. That’s a risk I’m at least willing to consider to show the El Salto bass something they haven’t seen before. I needed that first-person recommendation because frankly the thing looks like they just glued a bunch of random lure parts together. Once I went back and saw that it received a Tackle Tour Innovation Award in 2007, that convinced me to take the plunge. It took a while before I could find one new in the package for a price I was willing to pay, but that day has come and the sucker’s in my tackle bag. Mine is the rainbow trout pattern, but I’m sure that if Mexican bass like the action they’ll eat it just the same as a tilapia or shad version.
Flutter Spoons
Historically, May and June have been the best offshore bite for us, but some deep fish populations exist all year, and after wrecking them on Carolina Rigs, crankbaits and swimbaits we’ve looked for other ways to mop up the educated fish. With that in mind, I purchased a selection of the flutter spoons that have been so deadly on the TVA lakes and elsewhere, but I didn’t have the confidence to stick with them. Then I talked to Elite Series pros Brandon Palaniuk and Brandon Cobb, who’d been down to El Salto with Mossy Oak a few months earlier and crushed them with this technique. The only reason they didn’t catch more and bigger fish, BP surmised, was because they didn’t have any true magnums. Check out his video, below.
I’m a big fan of Megabass products, including but not limited to the Vision 110 and the Giant Dog X, and when this little swimbait came out I figured it might be a really good substitute for the Storm Wildeye Shad that is so popular down in Mexico. It looked slightly more snagproof and substantially more refined. I bought a few and then forgot about them. Then one of the guides started texting me pictures of bass with them in their mouths and strongly advising me to bring some this year. The ones he was using were almost destroyed. I figured that was a good sign and invested in some during the recent Tackle Warehouse Labor Day sale.
