Winter 2024
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Delaware I caught a bass through a hole in the ice on a Rapala Jigging Rap.
Ten years later I won a bass tournament in Southern California on Vail Lake using that same Rapala Jigging Rap in thirty feet of water. For the next seven years, I won a lot of tournaments on that lure while managing to keep this “hack” secret until it was publicized. Of course, I didn’t fish it completely stock, since I added a larger treble to the bottom and fished it with a stainless-steel snap on the end of my line attached to the eye of the jigging Rap.
Gone are the days of getting bloodied fingers hand- sharpening hooks and stealing your sister’s nail polish. Today you buy everything you can need to customize most any lure in ways yet to be imagined. I have rolls of adhesive mylar lure skin and three-dimensional eyes in all sizes and colors.
Lure dyes come in bottles of liquid or in Magic Marker style pens for customization at home or on the water. I have a box with all the different shapes, colors, and sizes of spinner blades and skirts to customize spinnerbaits, buzzbaits, jigs, underspins, Chatterbaits, and more.
Another box contains premium treble hooks of different sizes, shapes, and colors, some even with
feathers already on and needle-sharp straight from the factory.
You can even now add jewelry to soft plastics with screw-in wire coils that allow attachment of a spinner blade, making a sinking stick bait act like it is swimming through the water.
Painting jigs and hard baits is easily accomplished with air brushes and fluid bed powder paint systems. A quick search of YouTube videos will show you how to use these tools to customize any bait.
Instead of melting and welding soft plastic baits together with battery operated wormizers, now you can both repair and join soft plastic baits with chemical liquids like Mend-It and superglue.
Many decades of lure hacks have yielded fantastic fishing results. It has led to my development of designs used by national brands like Hildebrandt Spinnerbaits, Gamakatsu hooks, Yamamoto baits, Lamiglas rods, Basstrix, and many others. It has been said necessity is the mother of invention. Needing a better dropshot weight than anything commercially available in the 1990’s caused me to design and manufacture my own QuickDrops dropshot weights. If you want to take your fishing to the next level and gain the ultimate satisfaction and reward, try your own hacks. Ciao! •
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