By Pete Robbins
March 26, 2010
For a Carolina native who now calls Alabama home,
The first time he visited the northern California gem in 2003 he did well, finishing 27th in a stout BASS field. Since then, it’s only gotten better for him. When the Elites went there in 2007, he narrowly missed a final day cut, finishing 18th overall, and this year he made it to Sunday and ended up with a stellar 4th place finish.
While he relied on a number of different baits to earn his first Elite Series regular season top twelve since June of 2008, a critical element of his successful tournament was the 10-inch Yamamoto Kut Tail worm. That made it particularly special for Howell, since the big worm has been a pet project of his for several years.
“The big worms have been getting very popular in the last few years, especially in the summer months, and we didn’t have a real big one,” he explained. “It’s something that you need when you go to places like Kentucky Lake, Guntersville and Falcon. I told Ron (Colby) that we needed a 12-inch curly tail and a 10-inch straight tail.”
Colby, Howell and other members of the Yamamoto pro staff set out to make those visions a reality. The Curly Tail model proved to be the tougher of the two to get right. “We sent it back and forth and back and forth,” Howell recalled. “We wanted to get that tail swimming action without moving the worm at all.” The Kut Tail, based on existing smaller models, required fewer refinements. “We basically just expanded the length and the girth and tapered it down. We had to harden it slightly. It’s still soft but not so soft that it breaks off.”
While most anglers think of the big worm as a Texas rig only presentation, Howell combined the Kut Tail with two of this generation’s primary tournament tools – the shakey head and the football head – to make it to the final day of competition.
“The shakey head is so deadly everywhere,” he said. “I wanted to expand it, make it bigger and heavier duty.” The football head is exceptionally snag-resistant, especially around rock. To get the best of those two techniques his sponsor Lunker Lure pours him a football shakey jighead with a 4/0 or 5/0 Gamakatsu O’Shaughnessy hook. When the size of the bait or the fish demand an even bigger hook, a friend of his uses a Do-It mold machined to take up to a 7/0 Owner hook, and he used that one too. “It looks just like a gaff,” Howell said. “It fits the worm just right.”
But questions remain: Why the Kut Tail? What does it accomplish that a typical straight-tail worm does not?
“That tail is a little bit thinner and lighter, so it has a tendency to rise up a little more,” he said. “Yamamoto baits have a lot of salt, so they’re heavy, but this allows the tail to stay up. If you put other big worms in the pool, they just drag along the bottom with a dead flat tail. With the Kut Tail, the last 4 inches stays up and it ripples every time you shake it.”
While Howell typically started with a football head jig at Clear, once he boated a fish or two on it, the bite would sometimes die. Then he’d throw out the Kut Tail and just shake it slowly.
“The bites would be just a tick-tick-tick like it was a little fish pecking on the tail,” he said. “These fish really had to be spoon fed. I’d let them run after they’d take it and they’d still be barely hooked.”
His color of choice, as it is most places, was green pumpkin, although by the end of the tournament he was out of them and had to turn to the watermelon/green pumpkin laminate, another favorite. The bite was good, that he reported he only had 3 of that color left when he packed up and headed east. Other colors that he relies upon are green pumpkin with red flake, watermelon with red flake, and on TVA impoundments like Guntersville and Kentucky Lake plum is also deadly.
Howell credited his new Daiwa rods and reels for much of his success. “Long casts were key because they’d bite at the end of the cast,” he said. “That heavy-action Zillion rod had just enough tip and length to whip out a long cast.” Molix 19 lb. test fluorocarbon line was the final piece of the puzzle.
“Most people were targeting where the fish were going to,” he added. “But I saw that the weather forecast was in the 30s every night, so those 3 or 4 degrees we gained during the day, we lost them at night. The last day of practice I moved offshore from the spawning areas (that everyone else was targeting) and I found three different spots of scattered rock in 12 to 15 feet of water scattered over a hundred yard area.”
So now that Clear Lake is over and the spawning whackfests are beginning, does the big worm go back in the rod locker for Howell?
“I can’t wait to get to the summertime lakes,” he said, a gleam in his eye. The unspoken truth is that the big worms are here to stay.
