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By Pete Robbins

September 20, 2011

Fresh off the best performance of his FLW Tour career, a 2^nd place finish at the inland sea known as Lake Champlain, you wouldn’t expect Gary Yamamoto to be talking about retirement.

Well, he’s not…but he is.

The legendary lure maker credits his good performance up north, as well as a 5^th place finish earlier this year on the Red River, to the wisdom that comes on the far side of sixty years old. “I’m a retired senior citizen now,” he joked when asked about his two best Tour level performances since 2006. “I collect Social Security and I’m not playing around with cattle every day.”

With age comes experience, and in his eighth career event on Champlain he nearly ran the table, making it to the final day of competition. The trajectory of his performances here has generally gone upward, too. He didn’t earn a check on Champlain until his third appearance on the big lake, and only once in his first four tries, but in annual trips here since 2007 his finishes have gone up every time and he’s been in the money his past four tries. Now there’s only one space left to move up.

Largemouths Paid Off

While most anglers fishing major events on Champlain try to develop a one-two punch of largemouths and smallmouths, Yamamoto knew from the beginning that he’d target only green fish this year.

“Lake Champlain is noted for smallmouths, but in the past few years I believe that the largemouths are gaining in size and abundance,” he said. He loves to flip and pitch his namesake plastics into shallow cover and Champlain has miles and miles of it, everything from docks to laydowns to rocks to shallow grass. This time there was more of it than usual as Hurricane Irene visited the lake prior to the start of practice and raised the water level somewhere between two and three feet.

“A few years ago, I was here when the water was high and I caught about 25 pounds – five fish that weighed five pounds each – off some docks,” he said. “This was setting up to be perfect conditions to repeat that.”

Indeed, he repeated it almost precisely, bringing a 24-04 limit of largemouths to the scales on the first day of competition. That marked a lake record for FLW Outdoors events.

Unfortunately, the fish may not have left his areas over the subsequent days, but some of his key pieces of cover pulled a disappearing act. Gearing up for the rapidly nearing onset of cold weather, some property owners decided to pull their mobile docks from the water, depriving Yamamoto of his key fishing spots. Indeed, some of this happened as he watched and fished. One set of 10 docks that produced handsomely on the third day of competition were all out of the water on Day Four. As they disappeared, his catches fell, too, to still respectable weights of 17-08, 17-05 and 15-11. It was enough for second place, the first time he’s reached that position in tour-level competition since a 1999 Bassmaster Central Invitational on Oklahoma’s Lake Eufaula.

All About the Rig

Among the many successful baits he’s developed, Yamamoto is perhaps most noted for developing and bringing to market the Senko, inspiring an entire class of lure that did not previously exist. Even though he’s had it in his arsenal for well over a decade, he continues to expand and refine its uses.

Of course part of his success as Champlain was due to finding out-of-the-way places that harbored big fish, but with a rapidly-diminishing number of docks and two major tournaments on the lake, he also felt it was necessary to make a different presentation than everyone else. Now the cat’s out of the bag about a presentation he’s been keeping secret for a while – a backwards rigged Senko which swims away from him on the fall.

“I’ve been playing with it for about six months and it’s something that I’ve anticipated success with in tournaments several times,” he said. “I was hoping to use it (in the FLW Major) at Table Rock, but the lake got flooded and the tournament got canceled.”

The idea came about because he had trouble skipping a regular ballhead jig under overhanging cover. “Whenever I tried to skip it, the weight seemed to hit first and drop it right there,” he said. Eventually, he came up with the idea to put the weight and the hook at opposite ends of the Senko and that solved his problem.

He Texas rigs the lure from what is normally considered the “tail end” of the Senko. In other words, the eye of the hook is at the bait’s thinnest part. It took a while to settle on the proper hook. At first, he thought the Sugoi splitshot hook would do the trick, but the exposed hook caused problems. After experimenting with both Owner and Gamakatsu Octopus hooks in a variety of sizes, he settled primarily on a 4/0 Gamakatsu Octopus. “It’s a short shank hook and it’s beefy,” he said. “It’s so strong that I could use it to fish for tuna down in Louisiana.”

Rather than screwing in a traditional bullet sinker, he found his weighting solution in the aisles of the hardware store. At the “nose” end of the Senko he screws in either a ¾” or 1” wood screw. At Champlain he used the longer version (#6) to produce a faster fall. While an angler can use any one of the many Senko colors that Yamamoto produces, at Champlain he relied on #912 (green pumpkin and watermelon laminate), a top choice anywhere bass swim and in a variety of water colors.

He keeps his tackle choices simple: A 7-foot, light action spinning rod of his own design, paired with a Shimano Stradic reel in the 2500 size, which he spools with yellow Power Pro braid. The yellow coloring allows him to see it more easily. At the end of the braid, he adds about 5 feet of 16 lb. Sugoi fluorocarbon line. This combo is surprisingly powerful, not just in corralling open-water fish, but also in dredging big bass out from heavy cover. In fact, in one isolated Champlain cove, he spied a dock sitting in clear water, and despite his belief that he would have seen any fish that resided underneath it, made a long cast over the final bar. His Senko was immediately engulfed by a 5 ½ pound largemouth who bulldozed around every available piling and stick up before tiring and coming to the boat.

One key element of fishing this rig, Yamamoto said, is to avoid a violent hook set. “When you get a bite, keep the tension on,” he said. “When the fish gets the whole thing in his mouth, he hooks himself. If you try to force him out, you’re going to lose him.”

More to Come

With a fantastic finish under his belt, Yamamoto is hungry to get back on the water. He’s headed back to his Palestine, Texas home first, before heading to Alabama to fish the final FLW Open on Guntersville and then the PAA Texas Toyota Bass Classic on Lake Conroe. Both feature “the type of fishing I like,” he said. “Shallow.”

But with the limited off time he’ll enjoy between now and then, the near-septugenarian will continue to tinker with building a better mousetrap. He has nothing left to prove, but still wants to keep a hand in the game. Like the Senko, a seemingly simple piece of plastic with endless utility, beneath Yamamoto’s quiet exterior is a mind reeling with endless opportunities and possibilities.

“I spent two years on the Swim Senko,” he said, giving a recent example of his handiwork. “I don’t know how many molds and modifications we made, but it didn’t matter. Designing and perfecting is my life.”