We would like to give a “hats off” this month to Maverick Premium Fishing Lures. They’ve been on a serious roll this year, launching a number of new innovative baits.

Some of these baits have been long-time secret weapons of the master Maverick bait designers, and while we know it must have hurt, we truly appreciate their generosity in bringing them to the market.

Located in Lakeport on the edge of Clearlake, CA, every Maverick Premium Bass Fishing Lure is created and tested-by-fire by world class bass fisherman on this world class lake.

Learn more about some of our favorites below:

#1. The Bugly

Why it works: While the Bugly is big and meaty it’s also made of extremely buoyant hand-poured plastic. It has incredible attention to detail, always defaults to a defensive crawdad posture, and it’s something that the fish definitely haven’t seen before. The colors are meticulously dialed in.

Cold Clear Water Tips:
Colors to try - PB&J, Magic Blend with Red Flake, and Swamp Water. Rig it Texas style with brass & glass on 15 lb. fluorocarbon, or use the Jr. as a jig trailer with a Jig Monster Chaos Pro Football Jig. Fish on main lake structure and points, and get into the rocks while intermittently shaking and dead-sticking it.

Cold Muddy Water Tips:
Colors to try - Black/Red Craw, Black & Blue. Rig it with brass and glass on a 3/4 ounce bullet sinker. Drop it to the base of standing timber and shake it on the bottom, pull up a few feet and shake, pull up a few more feet and shake, and repeat this process and hit each “floor of the high-rise” on the way up. If the water is high then pitch to the base of tulles or into grass on a pegged Texas rig.

See it now >>

#2. The Bass Buster

Why it works: It’s a monster 10 inch stick worm with substance. It’s big profile tempts bass that have started to shy away from the big swimbaits.

Cold Clear Water Tips:
Colors to try - Summer Moss brown, Green Pumpkin Red Flake, Peanut Butter & Jelly, Watermelon Candy. Rig it Texas style with a pegged sinker and fish it like a big worm, or Carolina rig it to drag across main lake and secondary points. Joe’s personal favorite is to rig it with a 6/0 weighted Falcon hook and fish at a snappy pace along break lines on the shore specifically in Summer Moss Brown because it looks like a gopher snake. Gopher snakes are like bass candy – they can’t resist them.

Cold Muddy Water Tips:
Colors to try - Grape Blue Neon, Maverick Mangler. Use all the same rigging techniques as above for clear water.

See it now >>

#3. The Shark

Why it works: It’s bigger than your average leech type bait and softer too. This is one of the most versatile baits you can have and the Maverick color options are the most vibrant we’ve ever seen - they just light up the water.

Cold Clear Water Tips:
Colors to try -Magic Blend & Summer Moss Brown. Rig this bait with a darter head, drop shot rig, split rig, Caroline, or jig trailer…really get creative with this bait – it’s constantly proving and reproving its effectiveness in new ways.

Cold Muddy Water Tips:
Colors to try - Grape Neon, Ed’s Candy Craw. Use all the same rigging techniques as above for clear water.

See it now >>

Lake Alpine
Alpine is still red hot for numbers of bass on the dropshot, the jig, small crankbaits, and rip baits. Big fish have also been caught on swimbaits, bulky jigs, 10+ inch worm, and bit top water baits, but there is only a short window of time to do this from about 6:30 to 8:30 am and then again at dusk.

Lake Pheonix
Phoenix is kind of quiet right now. Some guys are reporting fish up to 6 lbs but it’s not my best pick right now. That’s not to say it’s dead though. If you live nearby, or you just love that area by all means fish. Best bets are 6 lb line dropshotting with 3”-4” Natural color soft plastics or shakeyhead jig with 4”-6” finesse worms. When the afternoon wind picks up try a white double willow 3/8 oz spinnerbait right under the surface. The swimbait guys are getting a lot of followers, but the bite is pretty dead.

Lake Kent
Kent is fishing much like Alpine but the best bets are crankbaits, football head jigs, and 6”-7” Texas rigged Senkos. Also the water levels are so low that you can do yourself a huge favor by photographing, sketching, or remembering all the structure that is high and dry so you can dominate when the water levels top out in spring.

Nicasio

Falling water means it’s easier to get around. But the question is which spots are worth getting to if falling water levels push the fish off the shallow cover.

I fished three of the last six days from the island; one day a 1 hour hike into the backside from the dam and one day from the island and from the back side near the school house. Every trip the water was lower and in total about 4-5 feet lower by the end of the third trip. Some spots still had good wood cover and grass, and I found a lot of 2-3 lb fish on these spots using a Jig Monster prototype white/chartreuse ½ oz spinnerbait, a ½ oz chatterbait in green pumpkin with 2/3 of a green pumpkin senko for a trailer, a ¼ ounce speed trap in red craw, a wacky rigged Baby Bass 5” senko and my two best fish (4/48 & 6.11) both hit a ½ oz Jig Monster Mayhem series flipping jig in Bludgeon & Lava Craw.

I took a quick hour out there today and found that some of the spots that are high and dry had break lines or rock piles within 20 feet of shore and I think a lot of the fish holding on lay downs have pulled out to these nearby breaks and ledges because in three similar spots I had multiple bites on the speedtrap in red craw and the Jig Monster Chaos football jig in ¾ oz Bludgeon and Brazen Bluegill. My best fish was about 4 pounds (left my scale in the car) or so but this was all in one hour so I can’t wait to get back out and revisit all my good wood that’s high and dry to see if there are breaks and rocks close by. It’s like pre-spawn but backwards.

Clearlake

Off shore weed beds on the north end are kicking out fish in the 3-5 pound range with bonus fish in the 5-8 pound range being not uncommon. Best baits are big soft plastics like 10” worms, magnum lizards, and super flukes on a Carolina rig, or 5-7” senkos rigged on weighted wacky jigheads. Top water fishing is hit or miss, but walking baits, poppers, and floater swimbaits like the JSJ Snack Size Trout, MS Slammer, and BBZ-1 have taken fish up to 9 pounds in the last 4 or 5 days.

As for the south end, 1 oz Jig Monster football head jigs in Bludgeon, Green Pumpkin Chartreuse, Brazen Bluegill and Sexy Shad are taking fish in the 4-8 pound range off some of the deeper docks and rock piles, with brass and glass rigged beavers, sharks, and paddletails or 5-6” senkos on a weighted wacky head producing good fish as well. I’m starting to hear reports of a deep diving crankbait bite but the fish are still in transition and that bite has not peaked yet.

As for night fishing I’m told that 1 oz spinnerbaits and 10” worms on brass and glass are producing well for guys fishing rocky areas around shag rock.

It wasn’t that long ago when I would have to toss (if the fish didn’t toss it for me) $20-$30 worth of Senkos and Beavers on almost every trip to the lakes or Delta. In fact, for a very long time the only solutions for the short life span of soft plastics was either melting baits back together with an open flame – a task that even veteran bass guys found dangerous, flawed, and only partially workable – or gluing them back together with superglue, and like the melting trick using super glue was not only messy and dangerous but also caused permanent changes to the bait such as severe hardening which is kind of the opposite of the entire idea behind using soft baits….they’re soft!

Tackle manufacturers also took a swing at this problem about 8-9 years ago by creating soft plastic baits out of elastomeric plastics that made the baits amazingly sturdy and amazingly stretchy without losing the softness. In fact these types of soft baits were softer than regular plastics. So, what’s the problem? They are a nightmare to fish. They literally fight you every step of the way to be un-rigable. They even, in the case of worms, suck the energy load of your cast from the rod by stretching at the exact moment of energy transfer from the rod to the bait at the release of the cast.

So it looked like we needed to just shut up and eat the cost of constantly burning through soft plastic lures at 50-60 cents each. However, with the explosion of West coast style swimbait fishing and the revolutionary new soft swimbaits like the Huddleston, Mission fish, Osprey, Basstrix, Mat lures, Baitsmith, and Maverick lures a whole new generation revived the quest for a glue that would repair baits and for good reason.

We are no longer talking about power worms and lizards for 3.99, and crankbaits for 4.99, but instead anywhere from $8-$12 for Basstrix all the way up to $39 for Huds.

The glue breakthrough happened about 1 ½ years ago when Tom Leogrande started Mend-it. Here Tom can tell you what Mend-it is in his own words:

CLICK HERE to watch the video w/ Tom Leogrande.

This stuff is incredible. I have tried dozens of glues and bonding agents and Mend-it has the best ease of use and capability. As far as I can tell the only material that even works the same way is Baitfix, a new glue from Baitsmith. They are similar products, but Mend-it has the ability to bond baits with a lot of PVC in them and has a short set up time. Because Mend-it has been on the market for quite some time they have solved a lot of issues with the applicator and the bottle for optimum storage with minimum evaporation over time. The Mend-it applicator seems to maintain flow from the tip without needing to be cleaned out every few days.

We do have Mend-it available on JigMonster.com – click here.

On a slightly different topic, many of the high finishers at record breaking Lake Falcon’s BASS stop this year were reported to have been gluing baits together in order to create a bigger worm. For example Ben Matsubo bonded a bunch of 5” Senkos together for his best fish so here’s a look at one I made in about 8 minutes with Mend-it.

Below there are two Gambler Ugly Otters; one was cut into three pieces and repaired….can you tell which one? Me neither.

So, give these new glues a try and get creative!