The night before StriperFest I was fishing the Cape Cod Canal with luremaker Patrick Sebile. Patrick shared stories of his adventures fishing around the world, talked about some of his inspiration of lure design and really seemed to get excited when discussing hook placement on lures. Patrick is constantly tinkering with hook size and placement on his lures looking improve hook ups minimize harmful injuries to the fish. One thing Patrick emphasized was that single hooks actually have better fish-holding potential than trebles because the wider gaps have more “bite.”
A small package from Sebile arrived on my desk this morning and reminded me of the conversation with Patrick. The package contained the new Sebile crankbait, the D&S Crank (standing for deep and snagless. The lure looks like an ordinary crankbait, but without trebles or hook hangers. Sprouting out of the belly of the lure is a large, wide-gap single hook. The hook swings up and down, remaining in the down position during the retrieve, making it completely snag-proof, even in heavy brush. When a fish strikes and the angler sets the hook, the hook swings up and securely snares the fish. And added benefit to the single hook is that it makes landing and unhooking easier on the angler and the fish.
The lure dives to 20 feet, and might just give me the inspiration needed to knock the dust off my old crankbaitin’ rod.
very interested in using single hooks on plugs, try to limit my lures with single hooks. However this has limited some of the lures I used to love to use [ floating Rapalas, pop r’s, etc.