Entry 208-4
Mark Menendez on Strike King’s Latest Lures
Part 4: The King Shad – The Next Version of a Swim Bait
Editor’s Note: Mark Menendez of Paducah, Kentucky, tournament fisherman and member of the Strike King Pro Staff, has been tournament fishing for years. This week, he’ll tell us what he thinks about the latest Strike King lures.
Question: Mark, when do you fish the King Shad?
Menendez: When I fish it is a much-better question than how I fish it. The King Kong, a giant swim bait, comes available in a 6- and an 8-inch size. The specific purpose for that big bait is to wake it on the surface for really-big bass. The King Shad is an in-between bait between the King Kong and a regular-style crankbait. But this swim bait can be retrieved extremely fast, it tracks very true, which is one of the attributes I’m the most impressed with, and it has a jointed body, which gives it a different action and sound than a crankbait or a swim bait.
The shape of the bait is exactly like the gizzard shad in most of the waters we fish. This bait will get you some quality bass bites because of its size. Since you can swim it fast, the King Shad has a life-like action that will catch a lot of bass.
I like to fish the Arkansas Shiner color because it’s a very-soft color with a little green on its back, copper-colored shoulders and big white sides, which gives the bait a very-realistic look. 
I’ll be fishing this bait on 17- to 20-pound-test monofilament line in and around cover. This is another Strike King lure you can twitch around cover. Now, you can crash the bait into the cover, but that isn’t what the bait’s designed to do. You can swim it, jerk it or wind it real fast by the cover.
So, after you fish the piece of cover by flipping, pitching, cranking or spinner-bait fishing, you may want to run the King Shad by the side of that cover to get an explosive bite. This lure is the kind you want to fish after you have your limit of bass and are searching for a bigger bass to put in the boat to raise your stringer’s weight.
Next: How to Poison Bass
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
