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Reinventing The Lure

Tribune photo by FRANK SARGEANT

Eric Bachnik, head of L&S Lures in Largo, says his company tries to perfect designs before manufacturing the lures, but anglers continue to "tweak" their favorites. As shown here, the out-of-the-box plugs also do just fine.

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By FRANK SARGEANT | The Tampa Tribune

Published: June 13, 2008

"Everybody wants to be a lure designer," the late Jim Bagley once told me. "And just about everybody is."

Bagley founded Jim Bagley Lures and was one of the nation's most successful lure designers, but he was always aware that anglers couldn't wait to start messing with his carefully crafted designs.

I once fished with Gerry Rumsey, a legendary South Florida angler who routinely caught 50 bass a day from the drainage canals on the west side of Miami. The only thing he fished was a Rapala, and he was convinced the lure had to have two modifications to do the job: He put a tiny metal snap on the nose, and he used fingernail polish to paint red gill slits on the head.

Did it matter? Hey, I'm not arguing with 50 bass a day. (We got 66, actually, the day I joined him - all on that modified lure.)

When I was a beginning guide at Homosassa, captain Gene Lechler showed me a modification of the 5M MirrOlure that I still use. The 5M is a floating lure with a metal propeller at the nose and the tail. Lechler said the front prop and treble got caught in the leader too often, and also pulled the nose of the lure down so it didn't have the "snap" he liked when he twitched the rod.

His redesign was to take off the front propeller, as well as the front treble of this three-treble lure. This causes the nose to ride high because there's less weight forward, and with each twitch of the rod the nose dips, while the remaining tail propeller spins and splashes.

And, true to Lechler's word, the lure is much less likely to get the hooks tangled in the leader as the lure darts back and forth on retrieve. It catches the heck out of sea trout.

Anglers Have Their Own Ideas

Eric Bachnik, head of L&S Bait Company in Largo, which produces the 5M MirrOlure along with dozens of other famed lures, says he regularly gets modified lures sent in by anglers who think they have a better way.

"We get some pretty good ones," Bachnik said, "but we spend a lot of time getting our lures right before we make them, so we stick to our production models 99 percent of the time."

Bachnik, grandson of Harold Lemaster, who founded L&S many decades ago, is an outstanding angler, particularly with topwater plugs. He spends hours on the water "field testing" every new design before it's released.

"Particularly with topwaters, a lot of how well the lure works is what the angler puts into it," Bachnik said.

On the day I fished with him off Pinellas Point, he proved that by catching three trout for every one I could manage, even though we were throwing identical Top Dog MirrOlures.

Fish Help Out, Too

One of the more bizarre modifications of a lure is actually one done by the fish. When a Tsunami swim bait gets worn out after catching a few dozen trout or reds, the soft plastic body pulls off, leaving only the foil-covered lead weight and the hook behind. This is useless for most applications, but as I discovered one day by accident, it creates one of the best Spanish mackerel lures to hit the water.

The "lure" is only an inch long, but if you cast the thing into a school of breaking macks and crank it back as fast as you can turn the reel handle, you'll get a fish almost every time. The remains of the 4- and 6-inch models seem to work best.

And, of course, adding a second lure to your first often spices things up. Many anglers like to put a 2-inch streamer fly or an eighth-ounce jig on a dropper leader from the tail of a big topwater plug when trout fishing. The idea is you pop the surface lure, the trout come up to check out the sound and eat the small and inviting "minnow" dangling below.

It works particularly well when the bite is slow and the fish are not eager to attack a big lure. It's a pain to cast, because the trailing lure creates lots of drag and sometimes snags the hooks of the topwater, but it can be effective when fishing is otherwise slow.

In short, if you enjoy tweaking your lures, go for it. You probably won't do much worse than if you fished it right out of the box. And who knows, you just might come up with the next Rapala.

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