The bass fishing world this week lost a popular pro angler who was influential in the popularization of modern techniques.

Dion Hibdon, son of a famous Lake of the Ozarks clan of anglers, passed away at age 58 earlier this week, leaving behind another generation of Hibdons to carry on the tradition of fishing excellence.

Hibdon and his father, Guido, each won the Bassmaster Classic and Forrest Wood Cup, both considered world championship bass tournaments. They also earned numerous titles in all of the major professional circuits. The father and son also are credited with popularizing styles of fishing that propelled success for anglers around the world.

I was fortunate to have fished two times with Guido and once with Dion, thanks to opportunities to ride shotgun with them in their Bassmaster Classic competitions. Each day in the Hibdon boats, I witnessed rock-solid evidence of their superior instincts and talents, and their creativity in solving the age-old riddle of finding bass and tempting them to take their baits.

Tips and tricks I learned while watching the Hibdons translated very well to my own bass fishing. They were masters of sight-fishing and other proven tactics, but they also were at the forefront of innovation in numerous areas, including light-line finesse fishing.

Dion Hibdon, who won the 1997 Bassmaster Classic on Lay Lake in Alabama, was a wizard at skipping jigs under boat docks to reach bass that rarely saw anglers’ lures. His skill in skipping jigs to the darkest corners was exceeded only by his utmost confidence that big bass were hiding in them.

I spent eight hours on a hot Alabama summer day watching Dion Hibdon skip jigs. The results were obvious, and soon dock-skipping became one of my favorite tactics at Chautauqua, Milton and other local lakes.

Dion Hibdon also is credited with inventing the iconic Guido Bug crawfish lure as a school science project. He poured prototypes in a mold he created from a real crawfish, and Guido Hibdon won the 1988 Bassmaster Classic on the James River in Virginia by pitching Texas-rigged Guido Bugs to cypress trees and other hard cover. Many soft-plastic lure makers soon came out with their own versions of life-like crawfish lures, but the Guido Bug set the standard.

I drew out as Guido Hibdon’s observer one day during the 1988 Classic and watched in awe as he caught bass after bass from gnarly thick cover in a creek off the Appomattox River near its confluence with the James. His skill was impressive.

Back home in Ohio, I adopted Guido Hibdon’s pitching and flipping techniques to pluck largemouths from the willows, buckbrush and hardwood tree trunks at Mosquito and Pymatuning lakes.

In 1987, I was Guido Hibdon’s partner for a practice day at the Bassmaster Classic on Chickamauga Lake near Chattanooga, Tenn. After an hour or two of working shoreline cover with baitcasting rods and reels, he switched gears and pulled out a spinning rod, tied on a Gitzit tube jig and began catching bass from the milfoil patches on mainlake flats. I learned Guido Hibdon had been pioneering Gitzit fishing for years on his Lake of the Ozarks home water in Missouri.

Tubes soon became enormously popular as flipping and pitching baits. I caught hundreds of bass at Berlin, Shenango, West Branch and Mosquito on Texas-rigged tubes and joined the growing corps of smallmouth bass anglers who dragged Gitzit-size tubes across the humps and dropoffs out on Lake Erie from Ashtabula to Buffalo.

Guido Hibdon, who passed away in 2018 at age 71, was inducted into the national Bass Fishing Hall of Fame in 2002. Dion Hibdon certainly deserves to join his father in the hall. His sons Payden and Lawson are carrying on the family’s bass fishing heritage in professional tournaments around the U.S.

I am thankful that I was fortunate to have had a front row seat to see Dion’s and Guido’s enormous talents on full display. What I learned from them still forms the foundation for much of the fishing fun I enjoy to this day.

Jack Wollitz has written this column weekly since 1988. Contact him at jackbbaass@gmail.com.