Largemouth bass inhale 8-inch trout and slurp melon-size balls of shad with ease, and many top anglers believe offering the same sort of colossal banquet is the best way to catch double-digit sized bass.

Eager to test that notion, I arrive at California’s Lake Casitas, one of the top trophy bass lakes anywhere. My fishing partner is Los Angeles firefighter Bill Siemantel, an authority on big bass. Recently, Siemantel and his partner Mike Hart won the 2006 Western Outdoor News (WON) Bass Tournament on Casitas with a winning five-fish limit of 34.94 pounds, which broke the WON Bass all-time weight record. Siemantel’s approach is simple: If you’re looking for fish over 10 pounds, throw baits much bigger than the norm.

As we motor through the early morning fog that envelops Lake Casitas, Siemantel explains from the console of his 19-foot BassCat the phenomenon of big baits.

History of Big Baits

“In the early and mid-1980s, a handful of anglers, including me, were carving giant lures from pool cues and table legs, but they were designed to catch the giant stripers that inhabit many California reservoirs,” Siemantel says. In reservoirs around the country, anglers were fishing other big baits for stripers—the J-Plug, Cordell Redfin, and heavy leadhead jigs with bucktail or vinyl skirts. When Siemantel began to troll his handcrafted lures for landlocked stripers, he made a discovery.

“I started catching huge largemouths. And I wasn’t alone. We went back to our shops to craft lures better suited for bass. Big bass baits soon appeared, including Alan Cole’s wooden jointed AC Plug, Worm King’s 6- to 9-inch soft plastic swimbaits with external jighead, Optimum’s 7-inch internally weighted swimbait, and Castaic’s 9-inch wood trout bait.”

But relatively few anglers were converted to the hulking artificials launched from salmon and ocean sticks. Recall that during the late 1980s and early 1990s, many bass anglers relied on small lures, considered “finesse baits.” In California, finesse proponents such as Mike Jones, George Kramer, and Don Iovino considered petite lures the most consistent method of catching bass, particularly in tournaments.

It wasn’t long before anglers fishing giant plugs began winning tournaments. Big-bait fishermen were becoming efficient at luring big fish and getting them to strike oversize lures. When Dana Rosen and Darin Tochihara caught a 6-fish limit weighing 63.26 pounds on April 30, 1994, with big wood plugs at an American Bass Association tournament on Lake Castaic, big baits finally hit the big time. By the mid 1990s, many anglers had made the switch to big artificials, and the number of giant bass caught rose accordingly.

Siemantel’s devotion to big baits was solidified when he studied the behavior of big bass. “Bass are mean, vicious animals that may attack just about anything from a two-foot snake to a careless duck,” Siemantel says, referring to bass as super-predators. “Anglers shouldn’t let the size of a lure intimidate them, since bass have no fear of large baits.

“I compare it to walking into a room occupied by a vicious toy poodle. The dog may only be a foot long, but he’ll try to rip your leg off because he has no concept of size. Bass are the same way.” Siemantel’s success with big baits led him to establish relationships with tackle companies eager to jump on the big-bait phenomenon, which continues today.