Bubba is an eye-catcher and a conversation starter, but more importantly it’s a proven fish-catcher.
July 16, 2024
By Todd Ceisner, In-Fisherman Publisher
As we eased away from the dock and idled through the small maze of moored sailboats and runabouts in Chellis Bay, I surveyed the front deck of Jimmy Kennedy’s Skeeter FXR and noticed one rod and reel combo that did not look anything like the others.
“What in God’s name do you have there,” I said, reaching out to lift up the tip of what appeared to be a heavy-action flipping rod that was paired with a reel that had no Earthly purpose being on the deck of a bass boat on Lake Champlain in late June.
“Oh, that there is Bubba,” Kennedy shot back in his charming New England-via-Mississippi drawl.
“Bubba what?”
Advertisement
He peered over at me and grinned, then said, “You’ll see.”
As I got a closer look at the combo, it is just an outlandish monstrosity of a bass fishing set up–and Kennedy knows it–but over the next few hours he made me a Bubba-liever.
Under bright blue skies, we hopped around bays, flats, and points looking for active pods of smallmouth or largemouth. While he offered up other presentations at various stops, Kennedy would invariably pick up Bubba and deploy it around any emergent vegetation. It certainly seemed like a confidence combo for him. In the span of a few hours, he caught a small limit of smallmouth on it before insisting I give it a try.
Advertisement
So what is Bubba and how exactly did Kennedy come to rely on it in and out of tournaments at a lake that is held in such regard for its diversity of cover, structure, and opportunities?
To be precise, Bubba is a 7-foot, 11-inch G. Loomis IMX-Pro 955C FPR rod designed for flipping and punching. It’s a high-performance broom stick. He has it paired with a Shimano Tranx 300 HG reel with the single-knob power handle. It’s basically a small winch like you’d see bolted to the front bumper of a Jeep Wrangler.
Bubba is a 7-foot, 11-inch G. Loomis IMX-Pro 955C FPR rod paired with a Shimano Tranx 300 HG reel with the single-knob power handle. It’s basically a high-performance broom stick with a small winch like you’d see bolted to the front bumper of a Jeep Wrangler. He has the Tranx spooled with PowerPro braid tied to a power swivel and finished with 16-pound Shimano Mastiff fluorocarbon as his leader. A 1/0 dropshot hook is tied about 8 to 12 inches above a 1-ounce pencil weight to complete the rig. A 5- or 6-inch soft plastic stickworm is typically his bait of choice.
“It’s way over the top. I think that’s why I like it so much,” said Kennedy, a Mississippi native who spends his days as owner/operator of JDK BBQ, a catering service based in central Vermont that blends his Southern roots with a touch of the north.
Either way it’s an eye-catcher and a conversation starter, but more importantly it’s a proven fish-catcher. At Champlain, bass anglers need to be versatile because of the diverse makeup of the lake. In a way, Kennedy blended classic big-jig fishing–think 1-ounce jigs with big craw trailers in thick milfoil–with a common finesse technique. And Bubba was born.
“It was just from relying on the dropshot so much,” he said. “I was fishing with some guys who were catching them on jigs and I wasn’t catching them, so I decided to throw a bigger dropshot. I started out with half-ounce weights but soon realized I needed something heavier to punch through. The heavier weight ended up serving that purpose as well as helping to keep it more weedless. I was catching fish after fish and it's become my go-to for grass.
“That’s how it started and I started catching good ones on it. I’ve caught multiple bags over 20 pounds with that thing in a short period of time so it’s like ‘Why change it?’ It’s a confidence thing.”
Of course, the dropshot lies at the core of the finesse fishing community and while it has inspired heavier-duty offshoots like the powershot for presenting baits in and around grass beds, Bubba takes that concept to the extreme.
The Bubba rig is spooled with PowerPro braid tied to a power swivel and finished with 16-pound Shimano Mastiff fluorocarbon as his leader. A 1/0 dropshot hook is tied about 8 to 12 inches above a 1-ounce pencil weight to complete the rig. Fishing with Bubba takes a few pitches and retrieves to get comfortable with it. It’s not really meant to be casted. It’s most effective when around shallow or deep grass. A short pitch is all that’s needed and the 1-ounce cylinder weight does the rest of the work. When a fish commits and tangles with Bubba, the fight is fairly brief. Between the upsized reel and punching rod, it only takes a few cranks of the handle and they’re in the boat. It’s really an unfair duel.
“I left the big saltwater handle on it because it feels so good. I’m just used to it,” Kennedy added. "Co-anglers will ask me, ‘Is that a damn saltwater reel?’ and I’ll say, Yeah.’
“The thing is by the end of the day, if I’ve had a good day with it, they’ll be asking a lot more questions like what size hook, weight and line.”
Making Bubba-lievers out of ‘em all.