GameChanger Lures Eeleminator – 2018 Sleeper Bait of the Year

The Mystery Tackle Box comes with all sorts of cool goodies in it. I’ve made good work of many of the included lures and with its terminal tackle, and I’m thrilled that I got the subscription for Christmas last year. During the summer, I’d say basically peak summer bass conditions, I decided to toss around a strange looking bait – it was a green pumpkin soft plastic, seemingly mimicking a tadpole, or a…something. It had a thick, bulbous body and a rage-tail imitating protrusion at the rear. I nose-hooked it with a screw-lock 4/0 Gamakatsu belly-weighted EWG style hook, with the pointy end coming up out of the top of the bait where the “eyes” are located. Throwing it on my swimbait and worm rod, I started tossing this thing around where I’d typically fish a worm, hoping that a soft plastic would work where others had before. The first day I threw it, I probably landed 10-12 bass, each of which seemed to eat the thing with great vengeance and furious anger, as my man Jules would put it, and it immediately became my new, favorite soft-plastic to throw.

The bait is the GameChanger Lures Eeleminator, sold by Karl’s Bait and Tackle (which is a division of Mystery Tackle Box, so far as I can tell). Where do I even begin with this thing? I guess I can start by saying that this bait, unlike anything I’ve ever used before for bass fishing, can be fished in so many different ways that it almost ceases to make sense. It’s marketed as a swimbait on the website linked here; I’ll tell you it took me almost a month to fish it any way other than the way I would fish a Texas-rigged worm, popping it into holes and along grass lines – swimbaiting hardly crossed my mind. When I did start to swim it, I started to notice its superb catching abilities even more than I had before...and I’ve been consistently blown away by how well it fishes ever since.

This bait is a combination between a Keitech Swing Impact FAT and a YUM Dinger, and can be fished the same way that you would either of those.

Like a Senko: I fish this thing belly-weighted regardless of technique because I like the bait to sink. I don’t want it sinking fast, but it needs to go fast enough to work that tail. My go-to technique for bass fishing on this bait is to find a good place to pop it – think holes in pads, along the ends of grass lines, around clusters of rocks etc. – and simply drop the bait in and wait. I’ve never had a bait be so consistently taken on the fall after the cast. It almost seems to me that if there is a fish in a hole and you put this bait into it, they’re just gonna bite it every time. If they don’t hit the first time, let it sink until you feel bottom, burn in a few turns and pop the rod to get the bait back up in the water column, and let it flutter down again. Rinse and repeat until you get bites, which I’m telling you, you will.

Like a Swimbait: The body of this bait is chunky, and the tail will move a lot of water due to its interesting dimensions. With that in mind, I’ve found the most success swimming this puppy at a moderate pace. I’ve found even more success using a rip-and-pause retrieve, which will allow for the natural tail action to really shine while the bait is falling (which, as mentioned before, is when a ton of takes will happen). High-speed retrieves didn’t net me any results of note this year, so a moderate, popping retrieve is my recommendation. Because of the belly-weighting if the hook, and the weedless nature of an EWG setup, running this thing through grass or other obstructions is a great way to get bites out of places where exposed-hook baits cannot. Keep that in mind.

To cap this off, there doesn’t seem to be much like this bait on the market, but the thing is so damn good that I reckon there will be in a few years’ time as more and more anglers catch on to this pattern and more producers move to replicate it. You just need to buy it – plain and simple. They’re fairly priced, much like most soft-plastics, and are well-worth every penny spent.

This is my 2018 Sleeper Bait of the Year.