ORLANDO, Fla. – Stephen Browning went frogman to replace the frog, swimming the extra mile to help develop a lifelike sunfish lure.
“A swimming pool is the greatest thing in the world,” he said. “I get (son) Beau to stand on the diving board and throw baits out. I take a mask, get underneath the water, and I watch.”
Browning and fellow Elite David Walker spent a lot of time watching this lure the past two years. They are on the LiveTarget pro staff and helped it evolve to win ICAST Best of Show in the Soft Lure category last week. The pros secretly tested the lures and gave their expert feedback for dozens of tweaks to perfect the Hollow Body Sunfish.
“We needed something new,” Walker said. “The concept of a snagproof bait is a great idea, but we’ve only got it in a frog profile. We did the mouse and I kind of liked it, but it wasn’t better than a frog. The sunfish is better than a frog because the action is so unique.
“The original one had this crazy action I’ve never seen. The one we’ve got now is that cool, but it still has the frog catching ability. I think it’s better than a frog. Will it replace the frog? It will in my box.”
Sunfish are what bass are really chasing, not frogs, Walker said. Anybody who’s fished mats knows to listen for the presence of the bream or they won’t catch anything, he said.
“When you hear those bream down there, popping and smacking, eating, the bass are in there after those bream. They’re not feeding on frogs,” Walker said. “Now, we’re actually giving those bass what he’s there for.”
LiveTarget founder Grant Koppers said the sunfish has been his most-requested bait, and he set out three years ago to deliver.
“When we make a prototype, we try to get it where we critique its castability, its walking action, its hookup ratio, the overall performance of the product and then we give it to our tour pros,” he said. “Of course, they test it, they come back with feedback.”
Sometimes lots of it. Koppers said the journey to make the sunfish an A grade lure was by far the most complicated his company has encountered.
“Lifelike is what we do,” he said, “but to make a fish behave and do unique and funky things is very, very challenging.”
Walker said the sunfish will dive, leap out of the water and can be worked to turn on a dime, things a frog can’t do. With no legs creating drag, the bait almost pivots on its center, he said. He can twitch it, give some slack and it will nearly spin all the way around.
Working to keep that action through the prototypes was a hands-on endeavor for the Elites. They would receive the latest version, try it out and give their thoughts.
“It was not a one-step, two-step process,” Browning said. “There’s probably 40 rounds of these things that we’ve been tinkering around the past two years.
“If you don’t like it, you’ve got to be honest. You got to send it right back to them and say this is what we don’t like, and they start changing.”
One of the major alterations was getting the bait wide enough to allow a suitable hook gap. The first prototype was an identical replica of a sunfish, but its narrow gap had an unsatisfactory hookup ratio.
“The original ones were anatomically correct, very thin and flat,” Walker said. “Yeah, it might look just like a bluegill, but you couldn’t catch anything.”
They kept increasing its girth, but then had to move the weight. Sometimes it came back and didn’t have the same crazy action Walker liked in his first version. Back to the drawing board.
“We kind of ended up with this legless frog,” he said. “We had to move the weight again, so it was a lot of moving this and it changed that. There was a lot of back and forth.”
Browning said five or six different hooks were tried, as well as four or five weight systems. Trokar came through on a weedless double hook with a weight system built in. Not only did that aide castability, but the bait will skip. Another change was putting a bend in the bait for its crazy action.
“The early prototypes didn’t have, what I would consider, the right curvature of the bait to make it do the gliding, to make it do the dipping,” Browning said. “We’ve got it down to where it walks the dog side to side. It will actually dip down in the water a little bit and pop back up. You just about can not work it the same way twice. And that’s the fun thing about it.”
Browning said several different types of plastics were tried and getting it virtually airtight while still allowing it to collapse in the fish’s mouth was a chore.
“This one, it’s so airtight it’s almost like a little marshmallow,” he said. “Even if that bait’s diving, it’s not sucking water in like your traditional frog style baits do. It just lets out enough air where it won’t suck back in water and go down.”
Walker and Browning’s feedback was invaluable in producing the finished lure that created a buzz at ICAST 2015. A year earlier, the LiveTarget crew was buzzing at an Orlando swimming pool assessing their progress. Getting under water helped this bait float to the top.
“There’s just a lot of little things you can learn from a swimming pool,” Browning said. “I want to see how quick it dives, how it moves in the water. You can hear it.
“It’s just a really cool looking bait, and it’s going to catch fish and sell. Not only is it appealing to the eye of the fisherman, but I think it’s going to be a bait that will absolutely catch fish.”
