Spro BBZ-1
Spro Corp.
3900 Kennesaw 75 Pkwy,
Suite 140
Kennesaw, GA 30144
(770) 919-8141
www.spro.com
By Jimmy Fee
Early last spring, I popped into one of my local bait and tackle shops to pick up some odds and ends and hopefully get some intel on what was happening in the nearby sweetwater. When the shop owner told me that the stocking trucks were on the road, brimming with feisty trout destined for the ponds and lakes scattered throughout the area, I could hardly contain my excitement. After a long few months of uncomfortable, admittedly desperate winter fishing excursions, I could think of nothing better than grabbing my ultralight rod, a few spinners and spoons and heading out with an excellent chance of catching fish.
The reaction of another angler in the store who had overheard the conversation surprised me. He was just as excited as I was, but for a different reason. “Excellent,” he said, “the bait has arrived.”
Bait? How could those 7- to 14-inch rainbow, brown and brook trout possibly be bait? I turned to look at the angler to make sure I’d heard right, and asked him, “Bait for what?” “Largemouths,” he said.
I’d heard of California anglers fishing for mammoth Florida-strain largemouth bass in trout-stocked waters, but in the Northeast, do many largemouths really grow big enough for trout to be regular part of their diet? I chose to dismiss this angler’s musings as crazy talk until a late-April kayak trip on Connecticut and Rhode Island’s shared water body, Beach Pond.
Around noon that day, after fishing since sunrise for a few small bass, pickerel and trout, I paddled to the boat launch to answer the call of nature, and there at the ramp was a proud angler holding up a catch for a crowd of impressed onlookers. The bass, the biggest one I’d ever seen in person, was flirting with double digits. The fisherman was casting a small spoon for trout, and hooked one, only to have it engulfed by the massive bass, which miraculously got stuck by one of the small hooks on the lure. As more anglers gathered around the fish, more and more rehashed tales of largemouths taking hooked trout or spitting up trout. As surprised as I was to hear so many instances of largemouth in the Northeast eating trout, I was equally astonished to hear that largemouths as small as 3 pounds will take a whack at trout only a little smaller than themselves.
There is a small sect of Northeast anglers hip to this largemouth tendency, and they employ giant, trout-imitating swimbaits to draw out the biggest bass in the lake. While the most obsessive of these anglers are dropping some serious green on swimbaits, with price tags reaching into the triple digits, many fishermen have a tough time shelling out that kind of cash for a freshwater bass lure. To further complicate matters, many of the lures fall under the “custom” category, and are made in limited batches, making it difficult for anglers in the Northeast to get their hands on one.
Recognizing the popularity of fishing oversized swimbaits for monster largemouths, Tim Normand, formerly of Spro Lures, went to swimbait savant Bill Siemantel to ask his opinion about Spro’s line of lures.
Bill was very much a part of the big-bait craze in California, and remembered his father making lures at his home that would catch 15- to 20-pound stripers and massive largemouths.
“My dad would sell them out of a box for $150. Not long after that, premium swimbait companies started making and selling lures for as much as $300. At that point, you’re fishing a lure that costs as much as a good rod and reel setup,” he said. “Every once in a while, I’d break off a fish or forget to recheck my knots and lose one of the lures. It happens.”
I wince every time a bluefish makes off with one of my $4 bucktails; I can’t imagine losing a lure worth more than 50 times that!
“When Tim asked me my opinion of Spro’s line of lures,” Bill explained, “I told him, quite frankly, they needed improvement. He took that seriously, and Spro went to me and a few other bass pros and told us, ‘You design the lures.’ Even though I do a lot of different kinds of fishing, I was known as the Big-Bait Guy, so I was tasked with creating a swimbait.”
Bill wanted to help produce a bait that was well built, yet reasonably priced. “The guys at Spro must have hated me. I took my time to make sure everything was right. They would ask, ‘Is it ready yet?’ And I’d have to tell them, ‘No, not just yet.’” Rather than rush an inferior lure into production, Spro let Bill take as long as he needed to make a lure up to his rigorous standards.
Bill wanted to make sure the swimbait didn’t fall short where many other swimbaits had. “Hook placement can have a lot to do with the swimbait’s success. If they are too close together and ‘marry,’ then you waste a cast. When I worked on the hook placement, I made sure the hooks would never link up when the lure was in the air, but would still be in the optimal place to hook any striking fish.” He also sought to minimize tumbling during the cast to reduce the possibility of a hook hanging the line and rendering the lure ineffective. Eventually, Bill had the design ready for production.
The result was the BBZ-1 – a trout-shaped, triple-jointed swimbait with an undulating soft-plastic tail and Gamakatsu hooks adorning the hook holders. Perhaps best of all, the swimbait retails at just over $40.
Instead of a single lure, Bill insisted on a “system” of lures that would cover the entire water column. “I’m a fisherman, I know that there can’t be one lure that does it all, so when I worked with Spro on the swimbaits, I wanted to make a system, three lures, that together, could work the surface, the middle and the bottom.” The BBZ-1 comes in a floating, slow-sinking and fast-sinking style, giving anglers the versatility to get the lure in front of the fish, wherever they’re hanging.
The BBZ-1 is available in two sizes, 6 and 8 inches, and comes in six natural colors in the freshwater model and three forage-matching colors in the saltwater model. “Swimbaits are supposed to look realistic, so when it came to colors, I wanted to keep it simple and stay away from the ‘fire tiger’ type colors.” Colors include rainbow trout, carp, dorado and more.
Matching the “hatch” has been a well-documented recipe for success for all types of fishing, and I promise you if there are trout in your local lake, there are largemouth bass eating those trout. So next time you hear that the stocking trucks have delivered the “bait,” tie on a BBZ-1 – you just might be surprised at what’s lurking in your home waters.