The mile-and-a-half walk over rock and marsh and sand was threatening to be all for naught when the wind caught my cast and sent my minnow-style swimming plug skittering across the surface before depositing it in the foamy water left by a receding wave. “This is stupid,” I said out loud, though as far as I could tell there wasn’t another human being around for miles.
The 20- to 30-knot winds hadn’t caught me by surprise – they were the reason I’d chosen to fish that particular stretch of beach. Tips from a few seasoned surfcasters had led me there. “The nastier, the better,” one had insisted. It didn’t get much nastier than that night, yet I was 40 minutes into casting and not a single lure I’d tried had been able to swim right in the big swell and fierce crosswind. It was pitch black, the waves were huge, and I was going on blind faith that some stripers were out there feeding in that mess. I just needed a way to get a lure in front of them.
I clicked on my light and went picking through my plug bag. Deep in one of the tubes, I saw a glimpse of chartreuse. I’d almost forgotten! Before I’d left my truck, I made one last-minute addition to the plug bag, a “pre-loaded” Super Strike Super “N” Fish. This plug has the same body as the original Super “N” Fish models, but it has a heavier lead insert.
The 5 ¼-inch plug weighs almost 2 ounces, and the slender, aerodynamic shape cut right through the wind. After I reeled up the slack created by the big bow in the line, a bass hammered the plug.
For all their simplicity in appearance, there is a lot of thinking that goes into the design of a needlefish plug, and this is especially true of the Super “N” Fish. Unlike a number of needlefish designs on the market right now, the Super “N” Fish is tapered at both ends.
Don Musso, founder of Super Strike Lures, landed on this needlefish design in 1981 when a friend of his, Charlie Ruger, was fishing Nantucket and saw a lot of fish being taken on needlefish plugs. Don set out to make a needlefish, but when he flipped through some old fishing magazines, he didn’t like the design of the needlefish he saw.
Don wanted a needle that did a better job matching slender baitfish in all respects. An outing in 1966 taught him just how picky stripers can be, and he wanted to make sure he made a plug that worked, even when stripers were tuned in on small, slim baitfish.
“We were catching all tinker mackerel, all around six inches, and almost as soon as we could catch the mackerel and send it back out on a hook, we were catching stripers. Well I caught a tinker mackerel about twelve inches and thought, ‘what the heck?’ I rigged it up and sent it out. I sat there with that bait while the guy on my left and the guy on my right kept catching bass, twenty-plus pounders, on the six-inch mackerel. Those fish just didn’t want to eat anything else.”
By tapering the back end of the Super “N” Fish, Don created a plug that sent out very slight vibrations, similar to those sent out by sand eels, spearing or actual needlefish.
The needles were a fast hit among surfcasters, and a number of impressive striped bass were landed on them, none more impressive than a 64-pound, 12-ounce striper caught by Tom Rinaldi on a 6¾-inch Super “N” Fish.
The first runs of needles were made of wood, but when Super Strike made the switch from making wooden plugs to making plastic plugs in 1984, the Super “N” Fish was the first Super Strike plug to be made out of plastic.
The plastic Super “N” Fish was made with a hollow body cavity, and, surfcasters being the tinkerers that they are, some anglers began “loading” the plugs. Well-known surfcaster Steve Campo began loading the plug so he could cast it through the wind in the Block Island surf in the 1980s. More recently, surfcasting writer and author DJ Muller began loading up his Super “N” Fish to fit a variety of locations and conditions from New Jersey to New England.
Steve Musso, who took the reins at Super Strike lures from his father in 1992, took notice of the success that Muller and other anglers were having with the loaded needles and decided to put a line of heavier needlefish into production.
“I wanted to make a needlefish that guys could fish when it was too windy or the current was too strong to fish regular needlefish.”
Mission accomplished. Steve added weight to all three Super “N” Fish sizes, the 5¼-, 6¾- and 7¼-inch models. The loaded plugs weigh 1.7, 2.3 and 3 ounces, respectively. Steve also added a dressed siwash hook on the back of the plug that, along with the red-colored eyes, will help anglers differentiate between the pre-loaded needles and the original needles.
The added weight is centrally located in the Super “N” Fish. “When most guys load the plug, they end up putting the weight in the rear chamber,” Steve said. “That makes the plug sink tail first, and I wanted to avoid that. I placed the weight in the plug centrally, so it sinks level.”
The plug has a very slight wiggle on the retrieve that adds to its appeal. My first experience with the pre-loaded Super “N” Fish was in an October nor’easter, when most of my other lures were getting blown back in my face. I had a pair of 3-ounce Super Strike needles, and I clipped on a black one and let it fly. The plug flew like a dart into the gale, sank quickly and began to sweep with the current. Without going into details, the heavy Super “N” Fish put a 30-pound fish on the rocks when no other plug in my bag could.
Innovative thinking by Don Musso made this plug legendary in 80s, and that same innovative thinking by Steve is keeping these lures at the top of the list for surfcasters throughout the Northeast more than 30 years later.