Entry 202-2
Shaw Grigsby on What Makes Strike King Lures Great
Editor’s Note: Fifty-one-year-old Shaw Grigsby of Gainesville, Florida, a longtime member of the Strike King team, has won over $2 million in tournament bass fishing. He’s fished professionally since 1984, and he’s the host of the “One More Cast” TV show on the Versus Channel. This week, we’ve asked Shaw to tell us what makes Strike King lures great.
Day 2: Catch the Red Eye
When I’m flying from one city to another, I hate catching the redeye – the airplane that leaves at 10:00 or 11:00 pm and arrives at my destination just before sunrise. But when I’m bass fishing, I love to take the Red Eye Shad because it’s a lipless crankbait that solves many of the other lipless-crankbait problems.
I never have seen a lipless crankbait that works as well as the Red Eye Shad. I like this bait because it’s small, compact and weighty enough that you can cast it 1 mile (well, what seems like 1 mile). This lure has a super rattle inside and is available in great colors. The paint job and the hooks are better than any other lipless crankbaits I’ve ever fished.
I love fishing the Red Eye Shad around grass and any type of vegetation, in pockets and coves and on flats. The real secret to remember is that bass eat shad. The Red Eye Shad looks and acts like an injured or a dying shad. If you’ve ever seen an injured shad, it often will have a red tint. Although the shad may be able to swim, it often will swim downward a small distance and then work up enough energy to swim toward the water’s surface. If you notice, many lipless crankbaits drop like rocks if you kill or stop the baits. However, when you kill the Red Eye Shad, the bait swims down, rather than plummeting straight down. This is one reason the lure is so deadly around vegetation.
When this bait runs into grass, you rip it out of the grass, and then you kill the bait, it swims toward the bottom like shad that has expended a lot of energy to swim free of the grass and is now swimming down to deeper water. 
When a bass sees that Red Eye Shad hit the grass, break through, swim out of the grass and then slowly swim back to the bottom like an injured shad, then the bass believes it’s found an easy meal to catch and eat.
The real secret to the lipless Res Eye Shad’s success is that it can be fished anywhere other lipless crankbaits can be fished. However, its new design, colors and the swimming action it has when killed makes the Red Eye Shad more productive than other lipless crankbaits in its class.
Contents:
- Part 1: Pure Poison – There’s Nothing Like It
- Part 2: Catch the Red Eye
- Part 3: King of Shads – King Shad
- Part 4: Computers and Bass Fishing
- Part 5: Become a Jack-of-All Trades
