Entry 289-5
Why I Worked On These Strike King Lures for Bass with Mark Menendez
Editor’s Note: Strike King believes that the best way to develop new and better lures is to have a team of professional fishermen, who earn their livings catching fish, identify how to design and improve lures that will catch more fish for more fishermen. Most of the lures developed by Strike King have been field-tested by some of the top fishermen in the nation. This week, Mark Menendez of Paducah, Kentucky, will tell us about the five Strike King lures in which he’s had the most input in developing, testing, fishing and promoting.
Part 5: Taking an Old Favorite and Making It New Again
Question: Mark, what’s another lure in which you feel you’ve had a lot of input?
Menendez: I try to remember what makes an old lure great. Whatever made that old lure great may be able to be used again at a later time when most fishermen have forgotten about the old lure. For instance, the Spit-n-King has been a staple in the Strike King product line for many years. But a few years ago, when I fished on Lake West Point, the Spit-n-King was my one-two punch for catching bass. On the last two days of the tournament, when I caught my two biggest bags of bass, that lure helped me win. I modified the Spit-n-King to make it a little more efficient by changing the front hook to a slightly-heavier hook than the one already on it. By putting that heavier treble hook on the front of the bait, I slightly pulled the nose of the lure down.
The Spit-n-King was designed as a popping top-water bait. It works very well when you’re fishing for top-water bass, but with a heavier hook on the bait pulling the nose down, I could get the bait to walk side-to-side with a walking-the-dog type action. The heavier hook on the Spit-n-King transformed the bait into a walk-the-dog, popping, jugging and spitting bait. With this modification, the Spit-n-King had a very-good profile, but an unusual profile, for a walking bait. It created a lot of disturbance on the surface of the water, and because of the action, the splashing and the noise, I could entice bass to come from a long way to the chase the lure. Because I won that tournament and got so much press on the Spit-n-King, my picture is now on the packaging for that Strike King lure, and it has become my signature bait.
Strike King has a strong pro staff because one of our jobs as Strike King pros is to learn to be as creative as we can with the Strike King lures. 
We not only fish them and try to catch bass on them, we attempt to learn new and better ways to fish the lures as well as how to modify or amplify the lures to fish them in different ways to be successful in various fishing conditions.
We try to understand and develop new methods and techniques for using Strike King lures to enable us to catch more bass than we’ve caught in the past and to be able to teach other fishermen how to catch more bass. So, like other Strike King professional fishermen, I’m constantly thinking about how I can make a lure better or different, whether the lures in the prototype stage or already on the market. The Spit-n-King had been around for some time, but I found a new way to fish it that allowed me to win a tournament.
