Greg Hackney won the Major League Fishing World Championship in 2018. The 45-year-old angler from Gonzales, Louisiana, has earned well over $3 million in tournament bass fishing and knows which lures to fish.
All anglers have to be concerned with the future generation of bass fishermen. I believe when a youngster begins bass fishing, he or she needs to catch a lot of bass, especially in the beginning. I also think that when you’re picking lures for a youngster to fish, you need to choose lures that are fun for that future bass fisherman to fish. The three lures that I recommend to start a beginning basser with are a plastic worm, a spinner bait and a plastic frog. All three of these baits are not only fun to fish, but they get a lot of bites.
The frog is a top-water lure. A young person can cast it out, watch it swim along a grass line or through cover and be almost mesmerized by the way the bait acts as it’s reeled. When a bass comes up and attacks a bait on the surface of the water, whether the young angler catches that fish or not, he sees that the lure will catch fish and cause bass to try to eat it. So, the youngster can be successful whether he actually catches a bass or not and can have fun watching the frog move on top of the water. Or, the beginner bass angler can have fun feeling the worm crawling on the bottom.
Just as critical as which lure to purchase for a beginning basser is to take that youngster to a pond that has numbers of bass in it, where the youngster’s chances for success are almost guaranteed. Lakes are located all over the country that are heavily stocked with big bass, and you pay a fee to fish them. But also farm ponds that receive very little fishing pressure have a lot of bass in them. The size of the bass that a beginning bass fisherman catches is not nearly as important as the number of bass he catches or misses when he goes fishing. For youngsters, fishing is fun, but catching is more fun.
