Entry 340-1
Five Strike King Lures for the Money with Greg Hackney
Editor’s Note: Thirty-six-year-old Greg Hackney of Gonzales, Louisiana, has taken the bass-fishing world by storm. He’s a part-time logging contractor and a full-time pro fisherman. He’s earned over $1 million on the BASS and the FLW circuits, won the Forest L. Wood Cup in 2009 on the FLW tournament circuit and competed in seven Bassmaster Classics. When you look at his credentials, you’ll know that his lure preferences are credible. Like the great baseball player Dizzy Dean once said, “It ain’t braggin’ if you can back it up.” And Hackney can back it up.
Part 1: The Hack Attack – You Can Pull a Freight Train with It
Question: Greg, what’s the most-exciting new lure Strike King’s releasing this year?
Hackney: The Hack Attack Jig. I’ve been involved in a number of new lures Strike King has manufactured over the years, but the Hack Attack Jig is totally my design. It’s my baby – my fishing dream come true. I worked with Phil Marks, lure designer at Strike King, on the hook, the eye design, the weight-forward head, the skirt colors and every other feature of the Hack Attack jig.
Question: Many fishermen say that a jig is just a jig. What makes the Hack Attack Jig special?
Hackney: At Strike King, we haven’t reinvented the wheel. We’ve just tweaked it. We’ve taken the best designs from every jig on the market and combined them to make the Hack Attack Jig. This heavy-weight jig is very weight-forward, which allows it to fall straight down and give a vertical presentation. The Hack Attack isn’t designed to be the end-all, be-all of the jigs. Like most Strike King lures, the Hack Attack was designed to fit a specific niche in the jig market. This isn’t a jig you’ll drag around in open water.
For that type of fishing, you need the Football Jig. Instead, the Hack Attack is designed to fish in brush piles, heavy vegetation and any place you’ll fish and use extremely-heavy line, a really-big rod and a powerhouse reel. Because the jig is weight-forward, it will fall right where it hits. 
It goes through brush, grass and cover easily and gets down in the “goods” where the bass are holding.
Another feature that makes the Hack Attack Jig special is it has a 30-degree line tie. Most jigs have a 60- or a 90-degree line tie, creating a “corner” on the jig. This means the line tie creates an angle that will cause the jig to get hung-up, requiring the fisherman to put extra pressure on the line to force the jig off a limb or to come through grass smoothly. If you’re fishing in tree tops or wood and brush, and you have to jerk the jig off a limb, the hook will stick in another limb because you had to apply so much pressure. However, with the 30-degree line tie, the line doesn’t come completely straight out of the head but rather at a 30-degree angle. So, there’s no “corner” or hard angle to cause the jig to get hung-up as much. The Hack Attack Jig slides through the cover almost like a slip sinker on a plastic lure.
All these features are very important, but I like the hook of the Hack Attack the most. The jig has a No. 6/0 Gamakatsu hook that actually was designed for catching big tuna. Since I’m from Louisiana and fish in salt water quite a bit, I started using this hook a few years ago, flipping soft-plastic lures with it in heavy cover. With that strong hook, I was able to catch big bass and snatch ‘em out of that cover. I wanted a hook that wouldn’t flex and that when I set it, I’d be ready to pull a tree or a monster bass into the boat.
I’ve actually used this jig in the last four tournaments I’ve fished. I’d fish with it all day, and generally if I fished with a jig that long, I’d cut the jig off my line at the end of the day and throw it away because the hook had taken so much abuse that I wouldn’t be confident it was as sharp and as strong as I needed it to be for the next day. 
But I don’t trash the Hack Attack Jig. I simply cut it off the line and retie it for the next day’s fishing. I used the same jig I won a tournament with at Reelfoot Lake and caught 10 or 12 bass in a few hours of fishing. I can put as much pressure on a bass as I want, thanks to this hook, and I can pop a bass out of cover. You just can’t go wrong with this hook because it won’t flex.
Pound for pound, there’s no stronger fish in the ocean than the tuna, so tuna fishermen need a hook they can pull a freight train with and not have the hook bend. You certainly won’t put as much pressure on this hook when you’re fishing for bass as you will when you’re fishing for tuna. But if I’m flipping 20 feet with 65-pound-test braided line and an 8-foot flipping stick, and I’m a 220-pound bass fisherman, I can put a lot of pressure on a hook. Today, Strike King has a hook that can withstand as much pressure as me or anyone else can put on it.
Question: You mentioned that you helped design the skirt colors. What makes the skirt colors on the Hack Attack Jig better than what was on the market before the Hack Attack was created?
Hackney: Most companies that build jigs design the skirts to fish in dirty water. But there’s a lot of flipping done in clear water, especially when you’re fishing deep vegetation, underwater trees, rock piles and stumps. With the Hack Attack Jig, Strike King came out with some skirt colors I call finesse skirts. 
They’re really-natural baitfish and crawfish colors, like the Sexy Craw. The Hack Attack also is offered in the same colors as the tour-grade Football Jig, because when you’re fishing deep water, even if the lake’s muddy, that mud usually is in the top story of the water.
Under that layer of mud, you may have extremely-clear water. So, when you’re fishing in clear water where you know the bass will get a good look at that jig, these finesse colors will convince the bass it’s seeing a bait and not a jig. My favorite color is Sexy Craw, a perch color with four or five orange strands in it, which is a really-natural color that enables the bait to look like a crawfish or a bream. The bass most often eat those two bait types. If you don’t have a box full of Hack Attack jigs, you’ll wish you did.
