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Bomber Long A
PRADCO-Fishing
Fort Smith, AR
Phone: 1-479-782-8971
By Jimmy Fee
One of the most popular lure designs ever created was the Finnish Minnow, made famous by Lauri Rapala of Rapala Lures. These lures featured a slim, realistic preyfish profile and a small lip that caused the lure to dive and wiggle as if it were wounded. These baits served as the inspiration for many more lures since their invention in the 1930s. Initially invented to fool salmon, when the lure design made its way across the Atlantic in the 1950s, United States anglers found that the Finnish Minnow lures drew strikes from just about every predatory fish in freshwater. Of the large number of Rapala-inspired minnow baits that hit the market, few have made the transition from freshwater to saltwater as well as the Bomber Long A.
The Bomber Lure Company has been around since 1946, but they didn’t introduce their version of the Finnish Minnow until the mid 1970s. Their objective was to make a minnow bait that had a different look and action and was tougher than the competition. To strengthen the lure, Bomber gave the bait a reinforced line tie and front hook hanger, as well as a thick-walled plastic body. The lip was molded into the bait, whereas most other minnow baits at the time were affixing the lips with glue. The result was the Bomber Long A.
The “look” is what initially set the Long A apart. This lure was the first to use a clear body and a flashy insert, to really give it a unique appearance underwater.
Early on, this lure’s most popular use was with anglers trolling lead-core line for walleye. Largemouth bass also had an appetite for the Long A, and anglers had great success working this lure just under the surface.
As the Long A’s popularity grew among freshwater fishermen, it didn’t take long for anglers to see the lure’s potential for saltwater gamefish. To this day, the Long A is best known in the Northeast as striper lure, and though Bomber Lures has a large catalog of baits – many of which were developed before the Long A – the prevalence of the Long A has dictated that most if not all saltwater anglers simply refer to the bait as “the Bomber.”
Besides their knack for fooling stripers, Bombers make a much smaller dent on the wallet than some custom wooden striper lures. In fact, as a young surfcaster with striped bass on the brain and a bankroll that reflected the my desire to fish rather than work during the summer months, the Bomber Long A made for an effective yet affordable way to stock my tackle box.
I bought two Bombers at first. One was all-black for fishing at night, and the other was mustard yellow with a black back and black stripes, called “yellow baby striper” by Bomber but known affectionately among surfcasters as the “school-bus Bomber,” for fishing during the day. My first fish on the school bus Bomber came from shore during a wet and windy late-October day. I had a clam-baited rod spiked at the end of the jetty, and was casting the lure as much to keep myself occupied as to tempt any fish. The fish smashed the lure just as I was about to take it out of the water.
My plug collection has grown considerably since those days, but while a number of more expensive, fancier lures are slid into my plug bag before I hit the beach, rare is the night that at least one Bomber doesn’t make the trip.
These slender lures make excellent sand eel and spearing imitations and will work on stripers from South Jersey to Maine. An old timer once told me that the best way to fool big bass with a Bomber was to reel it in so slowly that it stayed on the surface. On such slow retrieves, the lip would give the lure the slightest wiggle and would send off a large V-wake.
Bomber Long A’s come in 4 sizes: the 3.5-inch B14A, the 4.5-inch B15A, the 6-inch, heavy duty B16A and the 7-inch Magnum B17A, which now comes rigged with super sharp and strong VMC hooks. While the B14A and the B15A are most often thought of as freshwater lures, they make excellent spearing imitations to fool back bay stripers. The B16A and B17A are great lures for casting off the beachfront, around jetties or inside inlets. All models are relatively shallow divers, none diving deeper than 3 feet. The lures are light for their size, which means they aren’t the best casting lures on the market, but for close-range fish in shallow water, their action and ability to draw strikes is tough to beat.
Bombers come in a wide array of colors, but striper surfcasters certainly have their favorites. Besides “school bus,”silver flash/blue back, black, and “chicken scratch” – the name given by surfcasters to Bomber’s pearl/yellow color – are some of the most widely used colors in the Northeast. Anglers can choose a combination of size and color to fit their fishing situation, depending on the location and time of year.
Regardless of the season, no surf bag is complete without a couple Bombers. Each spring, when the herring sweep up the coastline with the first wave of migrating stripers in hot pursuit, the Bomber is one of the first lures I clip on my line, and each fall after the stragglers of the striper migration slurp up their final few sand eels and head south, the Bomber is one of the last lures I pack away for the winter.