Guido Hibdon, 1946-2018

March 11, 2018 By Ned Kehde

Guido Hibdon died on March 10.

Across the years, we have written thousands of words about his many talents and angling prowess. He was one of the forefather of Midwest finesse fishing. And as the years wind on, we will continue to write more about his unique wizardry. May peace be with him and his family.

Here are a few of the words that we have written about him in years past.

On July 10, 1946, Mamie Rose Hibdon gave birth to her fifth child. It was her fourth son, and he was named in honor of his father, Guido Clinton Hibdon Sr., who was nicknamed Big Gete, and Guido Clinton Hibdon Jr. was nicknamed Little Gete. His Little Gete moniker was so deeply rooted in some friends and family members' minds that it lasted into the 1970s, and well after the death of his father on November 27, 1968.

In the eyes of many astute observers, Little Gete eventually became one of the finest multispecies anglers the world has seen, and he possessed an extraordinary knack for catching black bass and winning bass tournaments. In fact, Rick Clunn called Hibdon one of his angling heroes and said: "He's very honest and I admire him." After the second day of the 2011 Classic, Kevin Van Dam paid a tribute to Hibdon's angling prowess by saying: "I remember getting beat by somebody who was the ultimate hole-sitter. A guy like Guido Hibdon, you could put him in a creek that had 10 bass in it and if you gave him a little time, he'd find a way to catch all 10 of them. I've learned that when you do find a special spot, it's worth hanging around and grinding it out." Peter Thliveros said that Clunn and Hibdon are his angling heroes, and he called Hibdon a true sportsman, an honorable man, the finest angler to ever wield a jig, and a wizard at employing a variety of soft-plastic baits. In 1991, Roland Martin hailed Hibdon as the consummate model for all tournament anglers to emulate.

Family is an inherent and important ingredient in the way that Guido Hibdon lives and fishes, and it's impossible to understand his manifold and great piscatorial talents without examining some parts of his family tree.

Hibdon is humbly grateful for the kudos that Clunn and others have uttered about his angling talents. But he notes that none of them ever saw his father wield his piscatorial wizardry. His father had an uncanny ability to establish a synchronicity with all of the fish that inhabited the Ozark waterways, which allowed him to know when, where and how to catch them.

Consequently across his four decades as a guide on the Lake of the Ozarks, Big Gete and his clients caught untold numbers of largemouth bass, spotted bass, crappie, white bass, walleye, blue catfish, channel catfish, flathead catfish, and big ones to boot. If he needed to catch some suckers, carp, buffalo, gar or other species, Big Gete could find and catch them too. He was a multispecies angler par excellence.

He was such a gifted angler and guide that Harold Ensley, Virgil Ward and numerous other knowledgeable raconteurs regularly anointed him king of the guides in the Ozarks region. And to this day Hibdon says: 'My father was by leaps and bounds the greatest fisherman that I was ever around." Hibdon notes that he and his brothers incessantly tried to find an error in their father's piscatorial ways, but they could never discover one.

The passion for fishing and guiding is a Hibdon trait. That link commenced with Little Gete's grandfather John Clinton Hibdon Sr. who was a fishing and hunting guide on the Osage River that courses across the northern Ozark region and merges with the Missouri River east of Jefferson City. Then when the Lake of the Ozarks impounded the Osage River in 1931, Big Gete began his guiding career, rowing his clients around in a wooden boat for $5 a day.

Even though the Hibdons relished all of the hours they spent in Mother Nature's realm, it was a hardscrabble way to make a living for 365 days a year. Sometimes it was impossible to get their daily bread; thus, they had to trap fox, raccoons, and beavers and sell the pelts, set trotlines and sell catfish, spend cold winter nights gigging suckers and selling them.

Little Gete's brothers Teen and Gail guided, too. Little Gete joined the family's guiding ranks at the age of 13. Until Little Gete finally acquired an electric trolling motor in the 1970s, he and his family spent countless hours either rowing a boat or walking the shorelines while they fished and guided. They also employed an anchor or two to keep correctly positioned on a fruitful point or similar lair.

For decades, the Hibdons' forte for catching bass revolved around employing live crayfish, which they caught and trapped in local creeks. At times, they also used chub minnows. In the spring -- especially during various phases of the spawn -- the Hibdons used the crayfish and chubs on a cane pole adorned with a bobber. They dipped them around stumps and boulders along the shorelines. On Little Gete's maiden guide trip in the spring of 1960, he and his clients walked several shorelines, using cane poles and chub minnows, and they caught oodles of spawning crappie. During the rest of the year, the crayfish (and occasionally a chub minnow) were wielded on baitcasting tackle, and the Hibdons would cast them around and across points and other bass lairs. On the crayfish and chub rigs, they affixed a small split shot 12 inches above a No. 4 claw-styled hook. The crayfish was impaled on the hook through its tail's first segment, running it from under the tail out through the back without piercing the vein that runs up the middle the tail. The chub was affixed either through the lips or behind the dorsal fin.

In the 1950s, Little Gete remembers accompanying his father and one of his brothers on outings to Bull Shoals Lake. This was the heydays of bass fishing at Bull Shoals Lake. Before such an adventure, they would catch hundreds of crayfish, and then they would fish until they ran out of crayfish. To this day, Little Gete says that it was an enchanting and educational experience.

Versatility and experimentation lies at the heart of the Hibdons' methods. Therefore, crawfish and chubs weren't the only baits that they used. They were virtual artists at employing such artificial baits as a Heddon Midget Digit, Heddon Super Sonic, Bayou Boogie, Pico Perch, and a variety of topwater lures.

In the 1950s, Harold Ensley and Virgil Ward introduced Big Gete to the virtues of a black hair jig dressed with a black eel, and from that time on, a skirted jig and its various trailers have played a preeminent role in the Hibdons' bass fishing repertoire. And as Peter Thliveros noted, Little Gete eventually became a jig maestro, dressing them with chenille and marabou, bear and deer hair, live rubber skirts, tubes, plastic worms and various other plastic creations. He even created a jig that would swim and glide to the left on a retrieve and another that would move to the right. He designed it for fishing around the thousands of floating docks that speckle the shorelines of the Lake of the Ozarks. One of his rods sported the left-swimming jig and another rod sported the right-swimming model, and when he fished the right side of a dock, he worked the left-swimming one, which would swim under the floating dock, and when he fished the left side of a dock, he used the right swimming jig. To this day, a jig, in its many manifestations, remains Little Gete's favorite lure.

Initially, the Hibdons weren't enamored with Nick Creme's rubber worm, which was created in 1949. Eventually Little Gete's brother Teen was the first Hibdon to work with it, and he employed it on the same split-shot-and-exposed-hook rig they used with a crayfish. As Teen tinkered with his worm rig, he discovered that a twisting and turning worm would often inveigle more bass than a perfectly straight one. To keep the line from becoming too twisted, he placed a swivel about a foot above the worm. Once Teen perfected this rig and showed his father and brothers how effective it was, it became a significant tool for all of the Hibdons.

As his father's health began to fail and his brother Gail guided elsewhere in the mid-1960s, Little Gete became the elite guide and fisherman at the Lake of the Ozarks.

And after he and Stella Conners eloped and got married in Miami, Oklahoma, on Oct. 28, 1966, Stella became the caretaker of the extended Hibdon family, helping them to endure hardships and to appreciate and celebrate minor and major accomplishments. It's a role that she still relishes and adroitly performs.

As the premiere guide and angler at the Lake of the Ozarks from the late 1960s and into the late 1970s, Little Gete helped Harold and Dusty Ensley with their television show, entitled "The Sportsman's Friend," several times a year. Ultimately all of the TV exposures made Little Gete virtually a household name across several Midwestern states.

As a byproduct of Little Gete's association with the Ensleys, he was one of the first anglers to wield a Reaper on a jig for bass. Harold Ensley initially created his five-inch Reaper on a jig as a lake trout lure, and in 1965 Ted Green at the Marlynn Lure Company of Blue Springs, Missouri, began to manufacture it, and he acquired a U.S. federal trademark registration for it on May 28, 1965. And by the late 1960s, the Ensley Reaper had become a noted bass lure in a number of waterways across the Heartland. After fishing with the Reaper affixed to a jig, it wasn't much of a step for Little Gete to start utilizing a CrÃ¨me worm on a jig, and since then, the jig worm has paid him enormous dividends.

Throughout the 1970s, Little Gete's fame spread. Other TV shows featured him, outdoor journalists wrote about his abilities as a multispecies angler, and as the bass tournament scene began to unfold, a number of tournament anglers got wind of his bass prowess and hired him to show them how and where to catch bass on the Lake of the Ozarks. Around this time, he was seldom called Little Gete, and from this point, it was always Guido Hibdon.

Hibdon never considered entering a tournament until a friend began to coax him to compete in one. When he resisted, his friend asserted that Hibdon was afraid, fearing that he couldn't catch enough bass to win a tournament.

In Hibdon's eyes, however, it was a financial problem, not fear of failure. He couldn't afford to miss a day afloat as a guide. What's more, he didn't want to cough up the entry fee. To ally Hibdon's financial concerns, his friend contacted several other friends, and this contingent of friends offered to pay Hibdon's entry fee and compensate him the money he would have lost by not guiding. His friend also offered to loan Hibdon his bass boat so he didn't have to use his guide boat, which was a big, rather well-used johnboat.

Once Stella and his mother encouraged him to enter the tournament, he did. It was a Bass Casters Association event at the Lake of the Ozarks in the spring of 1978, which Hibdon handily won by wielding a jig. After that maiden event, he fished two more BCA tournaments that year and qualified for their championship. Then in the spring of 1979, he used a jig worm to win the 1979 BCA event at the Lake of the Ozarks.

His BCA endeavors paved the way for his first BASS tournament, which was the Bassmaster Missouri Invitional/West tournament at the Lake of the Ozarks on April 23-25, 1980. During the three days of competition, Hibdon caught 56.4 pounds of bass to win that event and garner $10,500, and unbeknownst to the other competitors, his most fruitful lure was a black Guido Bug affixed to a black-skirted jig.

After that win, he went on the road, competing at three of the seven remaining 1980 Bassmaster events, where he found the fishing trying. For example, he finished in 104^th place at Guntersville, catching only 6.12 pounds of bass, and at Toledo Bend, he eked out only 21.14-pounds of bass to fishing in 95^th place. At the Bassmaster Classic at St. Lawrence, however, he fished a touch better, and his name appeared on the leader board at 10^th place, and his 26.2 pounds of bass earned $1,000.

When Hibdon won the 1980 Lake of the Ozarks event, Forrest and Nina Wood congratulated him. And Forrest Wood told Guido to give him a call if he ever needed any help. As Hibdon's road miseries on the tournament circuit compounded, he eventually gave Wood a call and confessed that he was a simple hillbilly who had become bewildered and cockeyed as a lost pup. Upon hearing that, Forrest invited Hibdon to visit him and Nina in Flippin, Arkansas. Hibdon decided to make that visit, which he described as a miraculous decision, noting that it "turned out to be the big break for me, and I've been a pro and a Ranger man ever since. I've been very fortunate to have some good people get behind me. There was always somebody there to help me along." Therefore once Guido and Stella Hibdon became prominent figures in the tournament world, they extend a similar helping hand to young, struggling tournament anglers that Forrest and Nina Wood extended to them in the early 1980s. In fact, the Hibdons practically adopted Shin and Miyu Fukae in 2004.

Some Hibdons initial woes also changed when Bassmaster returned to the Lake of the Ozarks for the Missouri Invitational/West on April 15-17, 1981. At this affair, he wielded a brown jig that was bedecked by a brown Guido Bug with reddish pinchers and caught 51.2 pound of bass, which put his name at the top of the leader board, beating Gary Klein by two pounds, and earned him $11,700.

After his 1981 victory, he wasn't able to keep the Guido Bug sub rosa, and scores of anglers yearned to get their hands on some of them.

The original Guido Bug was a byproduct of Dion Hibdon's school science project in 1977. Dion is Guido and Stella'son, and after that initial creation, the Hibdons, along with Stella's brother Virgil Conner, handcrafted thousands of Guido Bugs.

From Hibdon's perspective, the Guido Bug's flat bottom gives it an alluring action as it falls, and it does a better job of emulating the natural movements of a real crayfish than any artificial crayfish he has tested. The Hibdons created two Guido Bugs: a 3 3/4-incher that he used on a 3/16-ounce and bigger jig, and a 3-incher that he used on a lightweight jig and light line. In Hibdon's eyes, the most fruitful colors have been black, brown and green, and the claws sport a variety of hues: blue, red, orange, chartreuse, etc. They are always enhanced with rattles—except when he is fishing Bull Shoals, and that's because most Bull Shoals' bass are repulsed by the rattles.

For a short spell Bobby and Judy Ditto of Ditto Lure Company in Florida manufactured the Guido Bug for the retail trade, as did Gambler Lures. Nowadays it's manufactured in by Luck E Strike Lures USA of Cassville, Missouri.

In 1981, Hibdon started traveling the long and twisting road that led him to becoming a legend in the tournament world. For a few years, he continued to guide when he wasn't competing, and during the winter he even trapped and sold pelts.

For 20 years he plied the Bassmaster circuit, competing in 163 events, winning the Classic in 1988 and Angler-of-the-Year Award in 1990 and 1991. His name graced the top-50 portion of the leader board 110 times. He garnered a check 99 times.

During this 20-year span, he also competed on the U.S. Bass Fishing Association and Operation Bass' Golden Blend Diamond Invitational series, and he won Golden Blend's angler-of-the-year honors in 1990, which was the same year he won it in the Bassmaster circuit.

In 1982, '83 and '85, he ventured as far west as Lake Mead to compete at the U.S. Open, where he finished second in 1982. At the 1983 U.S. Open, he was paired with Bobby Garland, who introduced Hibdon to the Gitzit, which is a tube bait. After Hibdon's delightful and eye-opening day afloat with Garland, he subsequently introduced the tube to the bass at various waterways across the Heartland, Southeast and Northeast.

Eventually the Hibdons, with the helping hands of Virgil Conner, created and handcrafted their own tubes, which they called the G series that ranged in length from two to four inches. The body of the Hibdons' tubes had a tapered design that trapped air and exuded air bubbles when anglers retrieved it. At times scores of professional anglers, such as Peter Thliveros, would call Virgil, asking him to air-mail them a 100 or more tubes. Luck E Strike used to manufacture them in three sizes, but they no long manufacture them. So now, when the Hibdons need some tubes, they handcraft them.

Besides the national tournament venues, Hibdon also fished an assortment of regional and local tourneys. For instance, at the invitation of Al Lindner, he and Dion fished Kenora Bass International tournament at the Lake of the Woods, Ontario, where they used their tubes to bedazzle the smallmouth and many of their fellow competitors.

In 1996, he began fishing FLW events, and since 2000, it has been his primary focus. During the 2011 season, his grandson Payden, who is Dion's son, joined him and Dion on the FLW Tour. Dion, by the way, has been touring with his dad since 1985. Now at the age of 66, Guido Hibdon participates only in the FLW Tour events, but he, his sons and grandsons occasionally fish together at crappie, white bass and black bass tourneys on the Lake of the Ozarks, which reflects the Hibdons' multispecies talents.

Since the mid-1980s, thousands of words have been penned and published about Hibdon's prowess with light line and light lures, as well as his sight-fishing talents. In the minds of most observers he is the spinning-tackle guru. Hibdon readily admits that he relishes wielding spinning tackle and light lures, but he is and always was too versatile of an angler to use it when other tactics would be more effective. Therefore, even during his heydays, when he was portrayed by the media as the titan of the tiny tube and micro jig, Hibdon employed baitcasting tackle 70 percent of the time and spinning tackle only 30 percent of the time. When he won the Classic on the James River, he caught the bulk of the bass on a 3/16-ounce Stanley black-and-blue metal-flake jig affixed to a black-and-blue Guido Bug, which he wielded on casting tackle spooled with 25-pound-test line. Nowadays, however, his versatility has been compromised by arthritis, various joint pains and 66-year-old body parts, which have forced him to wield spinning tackle at least 50 percent of the time.

Back in his prime Hibdon was regularly called the father of sight-fishing for bass. But across the last 15 years he has lost interest in it. One reason for that is his eye sight isn't as keen as it was in the 1980s and '90s. Now he only does it recreationally on several Ozark reservoirs. He also disapproves of the modern sight-fishing tactics that most anglers employ. He says the new school of anglers uses crude power tactics to intimidate and anger the bass into striking rather than the finesse and sporting tactics that the original school of sight-anglers used to employ.

Across the years several serious health tribulations have complicated Hibdon's legendary career. Nine days after he won the Classic in 1988 he suffered a heart attack. In November of 1999, he was beset with throat cancer, and consequently, he fished only three FLW and one Bassmaster events in 2000. He had another heart attack in 2001. Thus, it is logical to assume that his legendary career would have been even more spectacular if those serious health problems hadn't afflicted him.

He was inducted into the Bass Fishing Hall of Fame in 2002.

His last tournament victory occurred at the Lake Champlain FLW Tour in 2007, and he retired in 2015. During the past two years, he battled the horrible effects of cancer.