Episode 30 - Babe Campbell Big Guy Baits

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Welcome to another episode of Muskie Gear Monday on the Team Rhino Outdoors Muskie Fishing Podcast. I'm Jeff with Team Rhino Outdoors and this week we are going to talk to Babe Campbell with Big Guy Baits. And we're going to talk primarily about his 7-inch bait, his 9-inch bait, and his 7-inch countdown. Those are the ones you can get at TeamRhinoOutdoors.com.

But we're also obviously going to go down the history, what got him into muskie fishing, what got him into building baits, kind of the trials and tribulations of muskie bait builders.

So that's kind of what's up for this episode it's been a relatively slow week on the receiving end at team rhino outdoors the ups guys haven't been bringing much neither is speedy but we did manage to get a shipment of savage gear burbot tubes it's a cool new bait for 2024 it's got an adjustable weight system on the tube and it's also got a rear blade trailer already pre-installed so it's It's kind of got some additional versatility.

And so it's just a little bit different presentation than what may be out there already. So go check that out. And hopefully by the time you hear this episode, I also have up there new bucktails. And that, again, also has an adjustable weight system. It's got clip-on weights. So you can, you know, if you want to run your bucktail a little bit deeper, you want to run a little bit shallower, it's got a little bit of versatility there too.

So just a couple new baits, cool new baits from Savage Gear. year. We also have, you know, you can just buy the packs of the weights for them and things like that. So I would imagine they'd probably work on, you know, your conventional bucktail, but I haven't had a chance to play with them yet. It's, you know, a week short, just a little bit a week before the muskie opener. When you hear this one for the Southern Wisconsin opener, it'll be like five days. So things are happening quick.

It's going to be muskie season before you know it. And if you're still getting out and you're chasing muskies this opening weekend and you need a few you extra items you know we can potentially try to get you some gear so check out team rhino outdoors.com like i said typically we'd be known for custom musky baits exclusive colors to team rhino outdoors and we still have a pile of that stuff but don't forget us for rods reels nets and tackle boxes so those are just a few things

that we have going on and nothing else to add to this episode i'll go dial up my conversation i had with babe campbell and big guy baits.

All right my guest this week is babe campbell with big guy baits babe thanks for taking time out of your schedule i know april can be a pretty busy month in the musky world so i'm i'm happy that you were able to take a little bit of time here and talk about your company today. Thanks. Appreciate it, Jeff, for having me. Yeah, it's getting pretty busy with the opener being, what, seven days away in southern Wisconsin here.

And I know I'm getting excited to get out and throw some of my new baits that I got coming up. But the way things are going, I might be too busy to get out. And that does happen. I had a friend of mine ask me the other day, he's like, you got any plans for the Southern opener? I'm like, yeah, probably be in the shop for the Southern opener, but I may slide out, you know, the week after that Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, somewhere in there.

Like sometimes, I mean, if I realistically, babe, you know, it is like working for yourself aside from like obligations you have with your kids, like realistically, you can pretty much set whatever 18 hours a day you want to work. Right. So if you, you know, if you want to take off on Saturday, you can do that. But otherwise, if you work it and then you want, you can take off on Monday or Tuesday or whatever and kind of work your schedule around however you want.

You just end up paying for it at some price. You know, at some point, you're not you're not obligated to punch a clock nine to five. Right. Yeah, you're definitely right there. And there's a lot of nights that people don't understand. Like, oh, yeah, it's nice on your own business. It's like, yeah, up till clock last night, the night before. And, you know, just really burning the can of both ends. but you're right.

I remember when I first decided I was going to go full time and do this, my aunt told me, she's like, make sure to take time on the weekends to go fishing. I'm like, forget that I'm working on the weekends and fishing during the week when nobody's out there. Yeah. I mean, certainly if you can, you know, make it work, that's a far better option.

I know typically if I'm going to schedule a, a day to go fishing, it's kind of probably be like a Thursday because I always figure like, you know, Monday and Tuesday, many of those anglers are hoping Hoping probably to have their baits by the weekend. But by the time Thursday rolls around, if you order on a Thursday and I don't ship it that Thursday and I ship it Friday, you're probably not expecting it for the following week anyways to go fishing with it.

Or you likely shouldn't. If you order on a Thursday, I mean, we'll do our best to get it to you, but there's no guarantees that it's going to work out. Especially it seems like these days shipping has been just a little bit slower than typical. You know, like usually, I don't know if, you know, USPS and UPS have changed up like their processes a little bit, but it just seems like things have been a little bit slower.

So, you know, just, just keep that in mind as you look to order musky baits this season. You know, babe, let's talk about muskies to start off with. When, how long have you been musky fishing and why muskies? Well, I think I started musky fishing in the late nineties. I grew up catfish bait and that's all I knew. And all of a sudden I found some bass fishing and then, you know, I'm like, oh, I accidentally caught a pike. I'm like, oh, that's cool. It's a lot of fun. I was really driven.

I went to Canada with my father-in-law while I had pike fishing.

I'm like, man, let's go catch some pike, you know? and all of a sudden somebody told me about muskies i'm like wait what are muskies you know and i really really love bow hunting and then basically the way it was explained is like it's basically bow hunting fishing and just the drive for me to catch one was just tremendous and then all of a sudden i caught one i'm like because i mean i just got chills when i said that because i can remember the first

one that i ever caught it was so exciting and now i'm just completely part of the business that's solely muskie fishing related and it's just been a lot of fun oh yeah it's it's crazy how you know how the once you get bit by one once you catch one that's it could almost can consume you i mean i'm sure there's some people that are like yeah that was fun but i'm going to move on to something else i mean it seems like there's a certain percentage of revolving door within the

muskie industry you know you get new anglers in and out every single year. And I'm guessing, like I said, people are like, yeah, yeah, that was fun. But I don't want, I don't want to spend that much time on the water to only catch one, you know, muskie or see one muskie. I have a friend of mine and he was big into muskies for a while. And that's what he, his, his kid wants to go muskie fishing with me because his dad won't take him because he's like, ah, it's too boring.

There's too much casting with no action, which I get, but I've never caught a bass or a walleye or anything else that makes my heart rate change like a muskie does once you've bitten by it for some people like you said it just consumes you and obviously it has done that with you know with you and it's done it with me and countless other muskie anglers it's just it's it's a wild ride that's for sure yeah i took my kid muskie fishing and i caught one and after he netted it for me i was shaking

he's like dad why are you shaking i'm like man i just i can't explain it buddy he said you'll you'll feel it one day and like three casts later, he hooked one and it popped off, right? We went to net it and I looked at him. I'm like, Hey, why are you shaking? He's like, shut up.

You know so it's a cool experience it definitely grabs a hold of you there's just no experience like it i mean outside of like i said shooting a trophy deer in your lifetime that's about the only thing i can relate comparable to the sport that we love well it's even better when you get your kids into it if they're you know if they're into it i got two that are into it and i got two that aren't i've talked about this on on this podcast and in backlash podcast numerous

times like my my oldest daughter and my oldest son they're into it i shouldn't say my my youngest his son he's not into it he's just starting to get into it because he's only 10 so but I think he I think three of the four are actually going to end up being muskie anglers and well you know my son got his first casting last year my daughter's you know gotten a handful of muskies and last year she just had bad luck every time I took her out she'd hook one but she just couldn't

put it in the net and you know watching them catch one it it in my opinion those are the best muskies I've ever seen caught in my life. Like watching my kids do it is, is awesome just because like they're pure, you know, the excitement is pure, right? They smile in their pictures. They're super excited about it. You know, us grumpy old men, we don't hardly smile in pictures anymore because it's just like, oh, ho-hum, you know, like I'm holding this muskie.

But like for them, it's just, you know, bright eyed and bushy tailed and just super excited about it. It's awesome. Yeah, definitely reminds you why we started doing it and why we love it so much. And my kids haven't got theirs yet, but they're driven. My son tells me, he's like, this is the year dad, this is the year. So, you know, if we can squeeze some time in between their activities, we're gonna get it done for sure.

Yeah. The activity is that's, that's a whole nother story. It's a baseball season for me. So it's been lots of nights. It's a diamond already, but all right. So babe, you got into musky fishing, you got bit by the bug, musky fishing.

Why did you decide you want to get into musky baits? Well i was i've always been a woodworker i've got a woodworking shop here at the house and you know i've always loved woodworking and i wanted i love fishing minnow baits but i couldn't find a minnow bait that i could fish in the shallow cover like i fish a lot so i'm like you know there's a need for that in the market i didn't really plan on there was a need for it that tool in my toolbox so my buddy and i were of course

sitting in the wood shop on a friday night having a couple beers and he looked at me he goes babe why don't you make your own i'm like, oh well that makes sense you know i got the woodworking tools the knowledge you know i love fishing was a perfect marriage and then i just started from there and it took me, oh about a year and a half to get my seven inch pull minnow bait nailed down and that thing is It's just awesome for heavy cover, for, you know, real thick weeds, rocks, wood.

It was just a tool I needed. So I, I built it and here I am today. All right. So you built, you basically started building musky baits out of necessity, right? I mean, you, you had a crankbait idea that, you know, you're a big and efficient crankbaits and you needed a tool to get the job done because the other tools on the market weren't necessarily exactly what you're looking for.

Or what makes your you know we're going to talk primarily about your seven inch your nine inch and your seven inch countdown today but like you know people see your seven inch bait and they kind of look at it and they probably think oh this has got to be a twitch bait but in reality it's really not once you talk a little bit about it yeah that that's a common misconception when people look at. I think baits in general, they look at a bait and like, oh, it looks like that

bait. Then it should do that bait. People need to get these baits in their hands and work them and see what they do and talk to the makers and see why they made them. Like I said, the 7-inch shallow pull bait will run about 6 to 10 inches. You can get it down to 18 inches if you really work it really hard.

But then it has a real slow rise. So if you got those fish that are up in that slop and you want to run something through there other than a spinner bait or even topwater, water you can and you know a lot of times those fish will hit on the pause and you can't really do that with those other baits you can't just pause them it was just something that i saw necessary and i wanted and the fact of the idea of catching a muskie on something i made was just awesome

to me and now 75 of the muskies i've caught in my life have been on baits that i've made all right well i think i skipped a step here so let's talk about the process of musking bait we kind of jumped into the baits a little bit let's talk about the process because Because, you know, the crazy thing about it is there's many companies in the muskie industry that people think are really big companies. They're, you know, they're from over, like their products come from overseas.

But the reality of it is many companies in the muskie industry are built right here in the Midwest or, you know, or East or whatever. But a lot of it's Midwest based. And, you know, it's not people in big shops. Like a big, a big company in muskie fishing would be like six people. That would be big. Most of them are one or two people. It's usually like the maker and maybe his wife or a friend or a brother. You know, like that kind of stuff.

Let's talk about the process because I don't think people understand that you literally do everything yourself on these baits, maybe outside of building the lips or stamping the lips. Yeah, you know, it's funny. I was thinking the other day, too, when you say the Midwest, I'm based out of northern Illinois, like five minutes from the Wisconsin border. And I'm amazed at how many builders there are within half an hour of me.

And it's nice that we all work together, too. and so that helps a lot because it said the process sometimes like man i can't figure this out what's going on with this and luckily most of the builders are nice enough you can call them or text them like hey how are you doing this or that and like we'll all share stuff together and you're right i do everything myself outside of you know if i can talk my wife into putting hooks on once in a while and my kids will help me

to you know earn their keep in the house here or a friend will have like a body making day and they'll come over and we'll make four or five hundred bodies in a day that way i have time to paint them and third coat them and all that stuff and you know one of the things about my baits that people really like are they're wood all my baits are wood outside of the bucktails that i make i buy buy my stuff raw and i have all the fixtures that i made so everything can be

duplicated as close as possible you know i have I have a fixture to put the lead in. I have a fixture to cut it on the router. And then I have, you know, certain patterns that I paint. I have stencils for most of that stuff. And then I've, you know, I quit my job two years ago to do this full time. I had one rotisserie wheel. I could do 24 baits at a time. I now have four and I can do up to 160 baits in one day on the clear coating wheels. So the process has stepped up quite tremendously.

It's just fun to create stuff on my hands, something that, you know, nobody else is doing. And in order to get the tools you need, I think you have to do that. Yeah. Like you said, everybody finds, you know, in business, even with, you know, I mean, we're just basically at its most basic form or taking lures and we're putting them in boxes and sending them out. Right. But the whole process from this business, from like the very beginning to what it is now has changed probably 180 degrees.

And the volume that we've done has obviously increased but it doesn't necessarily always feel like incrementally you know how much time it takes to do it and i'm assuming you're seeing the same thing with the you know building the crankbaits yeah absolutely there's uh i told buddy the other day i'm like hey i don't feel like i'm working as hard as i used to and he's like every time i call you you're doing something with crankbaits with the the business and i tell

you one thing i can build you anything but i definitely got a crash course in being a businessman when i started this and that's been fun to learn something new and i think that's what really drives me is i love inventing new dates and learning new stuff and it just keeps going and going.

Yeah, very cool. So, you know, before we get into the, you know, three specific baits, let's talk about if everybody's looking for your full lineup of baits and once you kind of talk a little bit about them. Where can they find them all at?

It um you can find everything that i make at bigguybaits.com that would include the seven and nine shallow pull baits the seven and countdowns the witch doctor flap tails which are phenomenal you can reel them fast or slow big fish producers i also had i took over rich ronard's bucktail business riches ambush due to his health he was no longer able to keep up with the production a lot of people didn't even know he made these but he thought it would help me round out my lineup

and also help him out by keeping his business going the way he wanted to go so that's where you can also you can find uh after probates by 9-inch probates and my countdown team running in all doors excellent so we'll get into those a little bit here you know we kind of touched on them a little bit let's say typical retrieve i'm casting that thing out how are you working this bait we're talking seven inch and nine inch on the shallow pole baits yeah on the shallow pole weights

like i said a lot of people have a misconception that's a twitch bait some people can twitch them but they're not made a twitch bait and i'll tell you the difference is a twitch bait has about a 50 degree lip angle the shallows have a 38 degree lip angle and when i cast them out i'll give it a couple short pulls and let.

It pause and rise at the top and then i'll give it a long pull and i'll let it rise the top and just kind of vary your cadence in but i mean you can straight retrieve them if you want i know some people will troll them at a very very slow rate, yeah just let it pause and just give it a pop don't i mean sometimes i find myself shouldn't like rubber sometimes i'm just whipping it and it's like a lot of times i'll just reel it

in and rip it and reel it in and all of a sudden like okay where's it getting a pop up i kind of play the game of where's my bait at and all of a sudden it gets smoked by a fish.

Excellent so i mean basically what you're telling me is that you know these crankbaits a lot of times people see a crankbait too and they assume it's trolling bait it's definitely built for casting oh absolutely everything that i get that question a lot at the show is like can you troll them i'm like you can i don't troll them i don't i'm not a big troller right and i'm not against it but i do have people who troll them i know they said around two two miles an

hour you control these things but everything that i built is built for casting it's very lightweight you know i'm not a big bait guy by any means so i wanted to make sure that my baits were light enough for everybody to cast all right now i'm switching up to the countdown let's talk about that is it the same kind of cadence when you're working it is it a pole or is this is this a twitch you can actually do both with this. The Countdown was another...

Tool that i saw needed to be put into my toolbox and like i said once again it has such that you throw it out there you count it down on it you can fish it in six inches you can fish it in 20 feet i have a friend who uses forward facing sonar and he tells me he's seen it down to 23 feet deep and he can watch it wobble all the way back on his sonar just fish the way it is and give it that pause and the thing is with this bait it's unlike rubber where rubber will keep descending suspending

where this will kind of almost suspend it still sinks but if you hold a tight line on there it'll suspend right in front of these fish's face and if you have a neutral fish and you know that fish is there you know he's from four to sixty you can probably get him to go on that because he's going to get upset and attack that thing about what's the sink rate on these things, i'd say about a half a foot per second now the density of wood is crazy so i

weigh every one of these, when I pull them off the rotisserie, if they don't weigh enough, I add another. All my baits have a minimum of two coats of true coat epoxy on them.

If they don't weigh what they have to, they get another coat. That way it's evenly dispersed until they weigh the amount that they're supposed to weigh. And I suggest using a single strand wire leader of about six to nine inches and then use high quality braid. Makes it work right. Sure. I think that's one thing people don't understand is inherently the different, you know, densities of each piece of wood, it makes it a challenge.

I think in some cases, I talked about it with Jeff Hansen last week and, you know, we did a wood versus plastics debate. And I think that, you know, in some cases, that's what, that's why, okay, like sometimes you have that wood bait that is the bait, right? Because it's just slightly different than all the other wood baits. And I mean, I'm not, I'm not knocking wood baits at all. I'm just saying like, sometimes they are like literally just special, right?

Oh, I get guys who call me and say, hey, I have this one, this one wood metal bait you made me, make me another one exactly like, and I'm like, I can get it real close. I can't say it's exactly like, cause I get, I use all premium pine. It's actually called Kiwi pine. It's from Australia to make my baits and the same board. I get, you know, multiple blanks out of it and none of them weigh the same.

You know, I've done the testing of going through and weighing, like, let's say I get 20 baits out of one board, all 20 of them weigh different, and some of them are extremely different. That's crazy how, how that works. I mean, it's the same thing I get. Some people are like, Hey, I want this headlock. I want you to weigh them all. I want like the heaviest one, which is funny because I have some people that are still like, Hey, I want you to weigh them all too. And then I want the lightest one.

It's just, it's crazy is, and to me, the reason that the way I get my baits and my tackle box is if one has like a slight flaw on it, maybe it comes with a scratch or a Nick or something on it. Those are the ones I get. And they, they all seem to catch fish. It's Yeah. I mean, definitely all my, the same thing, my baits, I'm not going to pull a bait I could sell off the wall and put in my box. There's going to be one that like, say the eye slid down during the epoxy in or something like that.

And I have like a, you know, a bait with an eye on its butt and it's like, well, what are we doing here? And those are the ones that work too. And, you know, there's, there's definitely all my baits, you know, are ready to use out of the box. You know, some baits you have to buy like, cool, I'm going to switch the hooks out. I use all quality stuff and my stuff is designed with all the, like say it has three hooks on it.

It's designed and action requires those three hooks to be where they're at and on the bait for it to work right. You don't need to change any of my stuff out. It's ready to go.

Very cool. So, babe, I think we, based off my checklist, I think we covered most everything. Is there anything else that you think that we need to add to this conversation? Oh, not really. Just, you know, good luck on the opener coming up here. And like I said, if you guys are interested in checking out my baits, check out bigguybaits.com and you can get your countdowns and shallows at Team Rhino.

And I really appreciate you having me on here. And, you know, I'm, I'm very excited and appreciative of where I'm at in life and being able to do this as a full-time job. Yeah, definitely. It's a, it's a fun ride. And I mean, hopefully many, many more years for both of us. Like I said, it's been a, it's been a journey. That's for sure. I want to thank you for your time today. It's been, you know, good talking about big guy baits. And like babe said, if you're looking for

your selection of big guy baits, check out big guy baits.com. We'll have everything. And I mean, it's potential. You might see a few different items pop up on a team rhino outdoors.com. But for now we have the seven inch shallow pole baits. You got the nine inch shallow pole baits and the seven inch countdowns. Seven inch countdowns are new recently and they've been moving well. So if you're looking to gear up for your next musky fishing adventure,

make sure you check out team rhino outdoors.com. And as always, I want to thank our listeners for putting up with us for another episode. And I hope for all of you that are getting your muskie season started this coming weekend for the Southern Opener, I hope you guys have a very great luck. I say guys, but I mean anglers, because there's definitely many female muskie anglers these days. So I hope you guys and gals put some big muskies in the net and good luck fishing. Music.