Entry 293-3
Five of My Favorite Strike King Baits with Mark Davis
Editor’s Note: Strike King was really proud to have Kevin VanDam, Greg Hackney, Shaw Grigsby and Mark Davis in the 2009 Bassmaster Classic in Shreveport, Louisiana, last week. Every day that week, we posted reports on how these fishermen did in this year’s tournament. Mark Davis has been a part of Strike King’s professional fishing team for many years, and he’s had input on many of the lures Strike King has produced. This week we’ve asked Mark to tell us about some of the lures that he’s helped Strike King design and build.
Part 3: Strike King’s Red Eye Shad with Mark Davis
Question: Mark, what was Strike King’s Diamond Shad doing that you and the other Strike King Pros wanted to change when the Red Eye Shad was invented?
Davis: Up until the Red Eye Shad was introduced, there was no lipless crankbait, including the Diamond Shad, that still would swim when you dropped slack in your line. The Diamond Shad and the other lipless crankbaits would flop over on their sides. The only way to get those baits to swim to the bottom was to slow your retrieve and keep them moving.
Back then, all the lipless crankbaits looked just alike. However, Strike King wanted a crankbait that didn’t look like every-other lipless crankbait. We wanted a different profile. We wanted a bait that would pull harder through the water and have a wider flat surface. The harder the bait pulled, the more control you would have, and the better you could feel it, as it swam and came in contact with cover. The Red Eye Shad also was designed to have more movement from side to side and a wider wobble than the Diamond Shad. Again, most lipless crankbaits had a really-tight wiggle at that time, and most of them had streamlined profiles. We also wanted a lipless crankbait that we could use as a drop bait. 
Up until the time the Red Eye Shad was created, there was no lipless crankbait that you could fish as a fall bait.
When you drop slack in the line, instead of falling like an anvil, the Red Eye Shad naturally swims to the bottom like a baitfish. That swimming action no other lipless crankbait had is what we wanted to build into the Red Eye Shad. Once we built the Red Eye Shad, we wanted it in different weights, so we could fish it in both shallow and deep water. We’ve learned there are plenty of applications for fishing that Red Eye Shad in much-deeper water than we’ve ever fished lipless crankbaits previously.
