Thliveros, or Peter T., as most people in fishing circles call him, had cultivated his professional fishing career on Florida's bass waters.
Lake Toho, not far from his hometown of Jacksonville, happened to be one of the lakes he had fished for many years. Newell understandably was grinning from ear to ear.
Thliveros rigged up a few rods for the day's fishing as he and Newell waited for morning takeoff. With Peter T. having a reputation for being a Carolina-rig enthusiast, it was no surprise that he assigned that rig to several of his rods. Then the fellow Floridian pulled out a large bag of what looked like lime green crinkle-cut French fries.
"I'll be throwing a centipede today," he said, while threading the stubby plastic onto a hook. "I have plenty of them if you want some."
The smile suddenly fell from Newell's face. "Was Peter T., the master of the Carolina rig, going to use that worthless stub of plastic? he wondered. "Everyone knows you use a lizard on a Carolina rig."
"No thanks," answered Newell in disbelief. A few hours later, as the gregarious pro checked a couple of 2-pound bass on a balancing beam, he culled the smaller one and deposited the bigger one into his full livewell, right next to Newell's empty livewell. Only then did the latter utter those dreaded words, "Uh, Pete, do you think I could get one of those centipedes from you?"
Thliveros laughed heartily and then proceeded to help Newell secure his first FLW Tour five-fish limit on a centipede.
This bait, or French fry, as it sometimes is called, is the dullest-looking bait in the bass-fishing business. In the world of soft plastics, where slender worms and creatures with legs or tentacles regularly take the spotlight, the centipede might be considered physically impaired. Yet, despite its squab appearance, the lackluster-looking centipede is a jack-of-all-trades.
On the other hand, anytime Len fished tournaments on the Chickahominy, he would throw a kudzu-colored centipede. "I would just let it drift down with the current," he said.
And to this very day, a centipede still is one of Len's go-to baits for fishing the trees in West Neck Creek on the North Landing River.
"I catch a lot of fish on it," he said, adding that he also still fishes slider worms there, too. "Sometimes, you just have to keep it simple to catch fish," he concluded.
Said Jim, "I took her advice and met up with the guide the day before I was scheduled to fish with him. I wanted to know what he would recommend in the way of lures and colors in soft plastics. His suggestion was short and sweet: 'shades of green and centipede-type plastics.'"
Jim just so happened to already have some watermelon seed centipedes in his arsenal when he hit Lake Gaston by himself that first day. He also had some paper charts of the lake.
When he launched that first morning on Gaston, he started by throwing a Pop-R topwater lure, which proved to be nothing short of an exercise in futility. It wasn't until he rigged up a centipede on a wide-gap offset worm hook, along with a sliding bullet weight, that things suddenly began happening.
As Jim explained, "I started hitting every Gaston boat dock and stump I could find...not just that day but for a period of days every spring and fall for several years...and I always had a rod rigged up with a centipede. That bait always was my go-to favorite following a morning topwater bite."
It should come as little surprise then that the centipede accounted for Jim catching a 6-pound female off a stump in one of the Lake Gaston coves.
"I still could take you to that spot today, and I wouldn't be surprised to hook up with another nice fish," he said.
Jim's centipede fever has spread to other members of the Bauer family, too, including his son and a brother.
While this bait always was Jim's preferred lure during his annual trips to Lake Gaston, he has a different choice for those times when he fishes West Neck Creek or other tributaries of the North Landing. Here his go-to bait (introduced to him by a friend) is the Charlie Brewer Slider Worm...and I would mention his all-time favorite color, but then he probably would come lookin' for me with a billy club. And we've been good friends for far too many years for me to allow something like that to happen.
Suffice it to say that, to this very day, there are two rods in the rod box of Jim's Skeeter that always have a centipede rigged on one and a Slider worm on the other.
Back then, Robbins fished a little Charlie Brewer slider head hard...first with a finesse worm and later primarily with the centipede.
"I think it was my friend Duncan Maccubbin, who first showed me the centipede in that context," said Robbins. "Fishing primarily out the back of the boat, he won more than his share of club derbies and typically caught many more fish than his partners. Sometimes he fished it deep, too, letting it fall endlessly on a 1/16-ounce head. He'd look at the sky, check out the birds, eat a sandwich, and eventually pick up his rod to feel a bass moving off with his lure," continued Robbins.
Up until that time, he had thought of the centipede mainly as a Carolina Rig staple. In the late '80s and early '90s, David Fritts used it a lot on Virginia/Carolina lakes like Gaston and Kerr to mop up where his crankbaits left off.
"When the baits still were comparatively unknown," said Robbins, "my good friend Bill Roberts once fished as an amateur in a BASS event on Kerr and proceeded to wax his partner, the famously-named Dusty Pine. Tired of it, Pine finally turned around and asked him, in total seriousness, 'How much do I have to pay you to get one of those worms?'
"In the late '90s," continued Robbins, "I fished with Randy Dearman at Rayburn, and he outfished me three to one with a similar looking Bass Pro Shops caterpillar stud fry versus my lizards. When he finally gave me a fry, I started to catch up. A few years later, I showed it to a friend when the scenario reversed, and he paid to overnight a bunch of them to the open (tournament) he was fishing."
Robbins still fishes French fries and centipedes but admits "probably not as much as I should. As I learned repeatedly in those early days, something about them makes them limit-getters but doesn't rule out big fish"...hence, a "jack of all trades."
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