Lures lure a fishing following
Lures No Comments »Steve Cooper
ANGLERS walking into a tackle shop looking to buy a lure or two can be forgiven for feeling overawed by a multitude of colours and types.
Every year a new lure appears on the market and becomes the hottest new thing.
The reality is that Australian lures catch Australian species.
The same cannot be said for the cheap imported imitations.
Australian angling has spawned a cottage industry of lure makers, some of whom have become international success stories.
To do that they first have to prove their product Downunder, and we anglers are not an easy market.
The hottest Australian-made lure, when I started fishing, was the Wonder Wobbler and it came in two colours, silver or gold.
Wonder Wobblers caught a variety of species ranging from trout and redfin through to salmon and flathead.
When land-based gamefishing took off along the east coast, the big lure of the day was the WK Arrow.
This lure dominated for a few years before losing favour to the slower retrieve Iron and Maverick lures.
As estuary fishing with lures for bream and flathead became more popular, anglers started using more expensive hard bodied lures from the likes of Rapala and Halco.
Soft plastic lures came into vogue around 2000 and the cleverly marketed Squidgy lures took Australian anglers by storm.
More recently, Berkley Gulp soft plastics have been popular, and this year a new innovation, metal vibes, are floating anglers’ boats.
In the freshwater, the growth in the Murray cod population resulted in a spurt of new lures from backyard manufacturers.
Overseas-made lures did not suit Murray cod so local anglers set about fixing the problem.
A successful cod lure features a wide, slow action and swims deep. The best cod lures are all locally made and include StumpJumper, which has become the benchmark, the Muldoon, Oargee and AC Invader.
Murray cod also found a niche with spinnerbait lures, also made locally - although many parts for these lures are imported from North America.
However, as local lure makers become more successful they look for new markets and some lure makers, like Halco in Western Australia, have grown from backyard operation to exporting.
The biggest Aussie lure success I have come across is the Tassie Devil, made in Hobart.
Garth Wigston, 69, began making Tassie Devils in 1979 in a shed at the back of a family business, and his first sale was to tackle distributor JM Gillies, in Melbourne, a company he still deals with.
In the 29 years since, Garth has sold between 15 and 20 million lures; so many lures have been sold that he is unsure of the exact number but JM Gillies principal Pat Levy says it is Australia’s top-selling lure.
“It’s an inexpensive lure that consistently catches fish and we sell about 400,000 of them every year,” Pat says.
Tassie Devils come in four sizes: 7g, 13.5g (most popular), 20g and 26g and there are more than 120 colours.
In my experience, No. 4 Clown and the various pinks, especially No. 55, work well in our lakes for trout.
Tassie Devils are exported to Japan, South Africa, Russia, Norway, Finland, Denmark, Germany, United Kingdom, Ireland and the United States.
Speaking from his factory at Derwent Park, Garth says when he started he wanted to come up with an original name and a friend of his father’s suggested choosing something that was indicative of Tasmania, which is why he went for Tassie Devil.
The name choice had an interesting ramification.
Unbeknown to Garth, Warner Brothers, which had a cartoon character called Tassie Devil, had already registered the Tassie Devil name in Australia. The company sent Garth a legal letter pointing this out.
“I told them I only wanted to use the name for the lures so they allowed us to do so on the condition we stuck with fishing,” says Garth.
An interesting follow-up occurred when Warner Brothers went to register the Tassie Devil name in Denmark and found they couldn’t because Garth had already done so.
“One good turn deserves another and we let them use the name in Denmark,” Garth says.
Garth explains that he wasn’t the first to make these winged style lures; that honour goes to Graham Johnson who made the Cobra lure, a name chosen because the lures resemble the deadly Asian snake.
Tassie Devil lure making has gone from two plastic sections glued together and held by clothes pegs, into a semi-automated operation where the plastic overlay is injection moulded onto lead moulds.
He is looking to introduce more single-hook lures instead of the standard treble hooks because “catch and release is the way the market is heading and this is what anglers want.”
Steve Cooper can be heard on the Casting Off program on Radio Sport927 between 4.30am and 6.30am on Saturdays.
Source : The Weekly Times
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