Entry 182-5

Why We Do What We Do

Part 5: The Red Eye Shad

Editor’s Note: Have you ever wondered why Strike King has some of the nation’s best professional fishermen on their pro staff? Does the company have pros only to make public appearances and represent their lures? Does Strike King use the nation’s top pros because they win the most tournaments? Does the company have top pros to use their pictures and images in advertising? We asked Mark Davis what’s the most-important role Strike King pros play for Strike King. “Our main jobs include helping develop new products, finding niches in the fishing lures on the market that no company’s selling, and looking for those subtle, overlooked aspects of fishing that we can incorporate in our baits to give our customers the best, the newest and the most-unique lures in the fishing tackle market today,” Davis says. This week, Davis will take a look at some of the new lures Strike King will introduce in 2007 and tell us what makes these lures special.

You don’t know this, but Strike King’s been working on this Red Eye Shad for a long time. The company hasn’t brought it to the marketplace because it hasn’t worked just the way Strike King wanted. However, now it does. You won’t really appreciate what makes this bait unique when you buy it in the store because the Red Eye Shad has properties you’ll only see when you put it in the water. It’s like an automobile at a dealer’s showcase. It looks good on the display floor, but you don’t know how it will drive until you move it from behind the plate-glass windows and let those new tires dig into the asphalt. You have to run it to see what makes it great.

What makes the Red Eye Shad such a revolutionary bait is not the way it runs, but the way it dies. Most lipless crankbaits, when you kill, stop and/or cause them not to move anymore, will fall like a rock. But the Red Eye Shad has a built-in action that causes it to swim down when you kill it. Instead of dropping like a rock, it swims down like a tired, injured or dying baitfish. This action drives bass crazy. There’s no other crankbait that swims down when it’s killed. Strike King’s professional fishermen asked the lure designers at Strike King to design a bait like this, and this reason is why the Red Eye Shad was so long in development before it came to the marketplace. Creating a lipless crankbait that will swim down rather than fall like a rock isn’t easy. But Strike King refused to bring this lure to the market until it would do what the professional fishermen wanted it to do.

The reason we’re all so excited about this bait is if you watch it swim in a hog trough or an aquarium, you’ll see that when it falls, it has a natural swimming action like a real shad. This lipless crankbait gives you an action that no other lipless crankbait I’ve ever seen will. Other fall baits, when you stop them, sink. But the Red Eye Shad keeps on swimming, making it very unique and unlike any other lure on the market. The swimming action is what separates the Red Eye Shad from every other lipless crankbait on the market. It’s also the reason all the Strike King pro fishermen are so excited about this bait. It has a rattle in it and a tight, wobbling action. It comes in great colors, and it casts good. You simply cast it out, wind it back and catch bass like you can with anybody else’s crankbait. But no one else’s lipless crankbait will swim when you stop it.

I catch so many fish on this bait when I kill it. I can’t believe it’s this effective. I really like to fish it around grass. When I feel those hooks touch that grass, I’ll rip the bait out of the grass and let it fall. Well, the bass can’t stand it. They’ve got to eat that Red Eye Shad. When I crash it into rocks, stumps, dock pilings or any other structure and rip it away from the structure after the collision and it starts to fall, the bass go nuts. Not only crashing the bait into cover, ripping it and letting it fall is a good way to fish it. Anytime you use a stop-and-go type retrieve, you’ll drastically increase your odds for getting a strike on this lure. In open water, when you pump it and let it fall, and you’re fishing for suspended or schooling bass, this bait will be extremely deadly. With this bait and the other new Strike King lures, you’ll be able to fish with baits unlike anybody else, causing you to get more strikes and catch more fish.

My favorite colors in the Red Eye Shad are the chrome, red, some kind of chartreuse, the No. 430, a red craw with a chartreuse belly, fire tiger and the bleeding chrome blue. I’ll mainly be fishing it around stumps, grass or any flat water where there’s plenty of shad. This bait can imitate shad, crawfish or perch, depending on the color of the lure and the way you retrieve it. As you can tell, I’ll be fishing these new Strike King lures constantly. As a matter of fact, they probably won’t send me as many as I want, but I believe I can sweet talk them into sending me more than they do. What’s important to remember is I make my living catching bass. If I don’t think these lures will catch bass, I won’t fish them. If I don’t believe in these lures and prove that they catch bass for me, I won’t suggest you try them.

Contents:

• Part 1: Why the Flat Shad
• Part 2: The King Shad
• Part 3: The Sand Blaster
• Part 4: The Red Eye Shad