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Patent Pending!
Patent Pending! by Martin Godliman
(Summer 2000 Edition)
I was
thinking one day recently of what lure to make next to amuse myself, when I
remembered the first jerkbait I made. It was made in the mistaken belief that in
order to make it dart and glide, it probably should be narrow at the front and
wider at the back. I caught fish with it consistently and still do, but it
definitely didn’t glide. Instead, it came back in a dead straight line with a
kind of rotating ‘wiggle’ at the end of the pull. I later realised that
after looking at other jerkbaits, I needed to reverse this shape and this was
successful.
After
a while I made, with small variations, copies of most standard jerkbaits
including the highly successful flippers. However, I couldn’t make one which
worked deep without killing the action with too much weight.
I had
a similar problem with making a lure for Nile perch fishing when casting from
the shore. When I tried to make a wooden copy of a large rattling lure called
‘The Salty Boogie’ - big cousin of the ‘Bayou Boogie’. It casts huge
distances, like a bullet, sank fast to great depths and without a diving vane
could be swept up the underwater rock scree without the tendency to dive into
rocky snags that a deep diving lure with a conventional diving vane would have.
At
first, I couldn’t get it to work until I made the top of the lure much slimmer
than the underneath. Then it gave a satisfying hard vibration which rattled the
rattles effectively - re-named by others, ‘The Chunk’. I have used it
successfully for pike on jerkbait tackle where the bottom is clean enough. It
also works well pulled through the turbulent water of a weir pool.
Recalling
this and my first early mistake with my original jerkbait, I thought I would
combine
these properties to make a flipper that sank and yet still had enough
action so the (jokingly called) ‘Patent Pending’ was conceived. As I hope
you can see from the pictures it is a simple teardrop shape narrow at the front
and wider towards the back, looking down from the top as well as from the side.
The first time I used it, it behaved as expected. It flipped enticingly on a
slow retrieve a foot or two deep. On one occasion I wound it back fairly fast
after a short miscast. I was surprised to see it had a tight, zig-zag action
unlike anything I could remember seeing before. It will do this fast below the
surface or more slowly deeper down. It works twitched, jerked and wound or a
combination of these. Needless to say, catching fish with it soon boosted my
confidence in the lure. I’ve made it in a few small variations in size - a
compact one of four and a half inches (pictured) is the one that seems to work
the best. Tim Kelly (he of the fly-fishing article) made a copy of his own and
caught a big double on it before the paint was dry!
