One Color Senko

During a recent issue of the Best on Tour newsletter, I wrote that if I had to have only one bass lure for the rest of my life it would be a Senko. Specifically, a green pumpkin Senko. It catches bass everywhere, no matter what the forage base or the water color, from 6 inches of water to as deep as you care to fish.

There are well over 100 colors of Yamamoto Senkos and after 25 years of fishing them and 20 years working with the company, I probably own most of them. But among those many shades, I probably use shades of watermelon and green pumpkin, along with black blue flake, the most.

But that doesn’t mean there aren’t other confidence colors. I add a blue tail to my black blue flake when the water is especially dirty. I like the core shot chartreuse tail when I see a lot of bluegill in the bass grounds. One of my favorite guides in Mexico swears by watermelon moondust, while his brother is an unabashed advocate of bubble gum. I never sleep on Junebug on tidal waters, while I pull out blue craw when I start to see crabs swimming around the grassbeds.

But I’ve never meaningfully experimented with the smoke hues – or the various colors based on baitfish like shad, trout or perch. Clearly they’re in the catalog because someone demands them. It wouldn’t make business sense to do a day’s run of some shade and then have them sit on shelves or hanging on pegboard for an eternity.

So what am I missing out on?

If I were to tweak and change and experiment, could I improve my system? Or could I even be objective when trying to figure things out?

So for now, I’m going to keep the system simple, and keep on buying the outliers. My biggest fear is that they’ll discontinue a color I haven’t amassed, and then shortly after that someone will win a major tournament on it and I’ll be left high and dry. I’ll stay heavy on green pumpkin, but I won’t just close my eyes to other options.