The Smile Blades marketed by Mack’s Lure are appropriately named.
Why? Because if you hang these easy-turning spinner blades on your fishing line they just might have you grinning all the way to the bank! If you doubt that, you probably haven’t crossed paths with a couple of brothers from Pennsylvania. They are Mark and Richard Fike, of Farmington.
The Fike brothers, you see, won the 2006 Cabela’s National Team Walleye Fishing Championship. This year’s contest was staged was on South Dakota’s Lake Sharpe in late June. The hard fishing Pennsylvania pair will tell you they wouldn’t have won the event if they hadn’t had Mack’s Lure Smile Blades to work with.
And I’m not kidding about that old business of smiling when they were on the way to the bank. For their win the brothers went back to Pennsylvania with a sparkling new Ranger 618VC boat powered by a Yamaha 150 h.p. VMax motor and $25,000 in cash.
Saying that Mark and Richard won the Cabela’s championship is one thing; telling how they managed to do it is another. That’s why I talked to both in an endeavor to come up with information that’s a cinch to be of interest to anglers who want to put more walleyes into their own boats.
Mark Five is 35 years old. Richard has been around for 38. Both say they were constantly encouraged by their mother in their fishing endeavors. The two feel they wouldn’t have enjoyed the success they’ve had as tournament anglers without her constant support and interest.
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| It was Smile Blades like you see here, and the fashion in which they used them, that enabled the Fike brothers to win the Cabela's National Team Championship. |
“I started using Smile Blades six years ago,” Mark says. “I won some at a walleye tournament in 2000. I put them in my tackle box. Then the following year I was involved in a late spring team tournament. The fishing was really slow and the fish were inactive. I’d heard Smile Blades could be fished at slow speeds. We put some on and wound up winning third place in the tournament.”
That was the beginning of things for Mark Fike where Smile Blades are concerned. Richard’s experience with them has followed similar lines. “I discovered how effective Smile Blades can be about three years ago,” Richard says. “I was at a tournament in Kansas and talked to a friend who was using them. Smile Blades have provided me with a whole new concept where bottom bouncing for walleyes is concerned.”
Talk to these walleye-fishing specialists and you’ll soon discover they avoid going into a tournament with “fixed” ideas. They stay loose in their approach and vary techniques until they get a handle on how the fish they’re after are reacting.
This flexibility in approach played a major role in their walking away with top money in the 2006 Cabela’s Team Championship. “The area where we caught most of our fish was so snaggy nobody else would fish it,” Mark says. “We stayed in tight and followed the contours while using a 2-ounce bottom bouncer.”
As experienced anglers can imagine, running through snag filled cover presented its share of problems. Mark and Richard found a way around some of them. “In the beginning,” Mark says, “it seemed like we were constantly hanging up. We lost a lot of Smile Blades in the process. Finally we came up with an approach that really helped.”
What that approach amounted to was switching to lighter hooks tied onto heavier lines and leaders. "We found,” Mark says, “that we didn’t have to break off after we switched to the heavier line and lighter hooks. We discovered that by simply stopping and using a steady pull we could straighten out the snagged hooks and pull free. Once we got our hooks in we could simply bend them back into shape and continue fishing. We didn’t lose any gear using this procedure.”
Mark remembers something else he and Richard discovered in Lake’s Sharpe’s snaggy waters. “We found we were able to see some of the underwater snags on our boat’s fish finding gear,” he says. “It soon became obvious that hits often came when our baits trailing along behind the Smiles Blades bumped off the cover.”
Nightcrawlers were the baits Mark and Richard used behind their Smile Blades “We used a double hook set up for our worm rigs,” Mark says. “We buried the front hook in the nose of the ‘crawler and left a couple of inches to trail out behind the rear hook.”
I’ve talked mostly about my interview with Mark Fike. Richard has done even more tournament fishing than his younger brother. In fact, Richard won a second walleye tournament since taking the Cabela’s championship. He used both Mack’s Lure Smile Blades along with Mack’s Lure Hot Wings to do it.
I’ll get into the details of Richard Fike’s accomplishments as an award-winning walleye angler in my next column here at the Mack’s web site. Watch for it beginning Aug. 15.
-To Be Continued
