Entry 208-3

Mark Menendez on Strike King’s Latest Lures

Part 3: The Flat Shad – the Spinner Bait with Treble Hooks

Question: Mark, in your opinion, what makes the Flat Shad different from other spinner baits?

Menendez: The Flat Shad is a flat-sided, balsa spinner bait with treble hooks and a thin, narrow body. It’s a bait I use when I need speed to catch bass. If you tune this bait so it runs perfectly straight, you can’t over-crank it.

I fish this bait a lot down the bank, when I come to those little gravel-point transition areas during the pre-spawn. During the post-spawn, I fish it a lot around boat docks. I especially like to rip it under floating docks. The bait dives 2- to 4-feet deep, and you can fish it through cover. However, you have to be a little-more careful when you bring it through cover because it has a rounded bill instead of a square bill like a Strike King 4S crankbait. You have to pay more attention to what the bait is doing as you’re bringing it down the edges of lay-down logs or around the sides of underwater stumps.

But I really like fishing this bait because I can reel it up next to cover, let it sit still and then twitch it like you would do a jerkbait, making it give off an erratic flash that will get a bass’ attention and cause the fish to want to eat it. I especially like to fish this bait in the fall, when all the other anglers are fishing spinner baits and crankbaits. At that time of year, everybody’s fishing visible cover along the shorelines, so the bass may see several-dozen crankbaits in a day of fishing.

I like the Flat Shad because I can make multiple presentations to the same piece of cover and make the lure look and/or move differently each time I cast it to that cover. I like to crank the bait down, get it in what I believe to be the strike zone of the bass and twitch it two, three or maybe four times to get that really-erratic flash. I’m giving the fish something they’re not seeing and probably catching bass other fishermen aren’t catching.

The Flat Shad resembles a baitfish, it has a high-pitched vibration and tight wiggle that cause bass to travel a long way to get it, plus it gives me a variety of ways to catch a bass. I can burn it like a crankbait, stop it and twitch it like a jerkbait or bring it around and through cover like a spinner bait. Whatever way the bass decides it wants to take that lure, I can give the fish a presentation that it wants to eat. Now, even if a bass doesn’t know which way it wants the lure presented, I can retrieve that lure so many different ways that sooner or later, I can make the bass bite.

Next: The King Shad – The Next Version of a Swim Bait

Contents:

• Part 1: Lucky Shad – Red Eye Shad
• Part 2: Spinning the Strike Shad
• Part 3: The Flat Shad – the Spinner Bait with Treble Hooks
• Part 4: The King Shad – The Next Version of a Swim Bait
• Part 5: How to Poison Bass