Entry 306-1

Top Angler Kevin VanDam Goes Soft with Strike King Lures

Part 1: The Super-Buoyant Perfect Plastic

Question: What makes Strike King’s new Perfect Plastic lures so special?

VanDam: The plastic the lures are constructed from is ultra soft, and Strike King has loaded them with lots of salt. Not only does salt offer a good flavor to the bass, but it imitates the prey on which they feed. Shad and other baitfish have a salt component to their blood, so when a bass bites down on one of these new Perfect Plastic soft-plastic baits and tastes that salt, the bass hangs on to the bait longer, giving you more time to feel the bite and set the hook.

Besides the salt, Strike King also has added the coffee flavoring to the Perfect Plastics to make the bass hold on to these baits longer. Too, salt adds weight to the lures. In baits like the Ocho and the Caffeine Shad, the additional weight from the salt allows you to make longer casts. Also, the salt from these lures aids in helping the bait fall in more of a horizontal plane and changes and enhances the action of the lures.

All these different lures we’ve made from the Perfect Plastic and beefed-up with salt and caffeine are designed to have perfect performance. The Caffeine Shad is a soft-plastic jerkbait, much like the Zulu. With the perfect plastic, Strike King has taken a neutral-buoyancy lure and made it sink faster, taste better and have a different action from the Zulu. The Ocho is a stick worm, the Game Hawg is a creature bait, and the Rodent is a beaver-style bait. All these shapes have proven bass-fishing success.

So, we’ve tweaked the design on each one to allow the super-soft plastic to enhance the action. We’ve built appendages on these lures that give the baits more action and increase their fish-catching abilities.

Question: Kevin, when Strike King came out with the 3X plastic, it was soft, tough and almost indestructible. Why did Strike King decide to go the other way and develop a super-soft plastic?

VanDam: The 3X plastic is a great product. It has just the opposite effect on the lures as the Perfect Plastic does. The 3X plastic makes lures super-buoyant and helps soft plastics stand-up on the bottom, float-up, have neutral buoyancy and/or swim on the top. These are all qualities you need in a soft-plastic bait. For instance, you want the tail of the Strike King Shaky Head worm to rise-up off the bottom when the jig hits the bottom to give the bait action and make it easier for the bass to find. Nothing does this better than the 3X plastic. But, just like there are occasions when you’re bass fishing when you need a lure to be super-buoyant, there also are times when you need a lure to sink and go to the bottom. So, we’ve used the Perfect Plastic to create lures that can be fished as sinking baits, instead of floating or neutral-buoyancy baits.

If you want a creature bait to stand-up off the bottom, you want it made out of the 3X plastic. But if you want a lure to fall through a bush quickly and easily, you want it constructed with the new Perfect Plastic. Just like there are different lures for various fishing applications, we’ve created soft plastics that both sink and float. And, the new Perfect Plastic is Strike King’s version of sinking soft plastics. Although the Perfect Plastic is soft and not as tough as the 3X, it’s still durable. With the Perfect Plastic, we wanted to use shapes and types of lures that the fishermen were familiar with, had proven bass-catching success and create a lure that would sink and not float. We wanted to make the Perfect Plastic lures better than anything fishermen have used in the past.

Question: What’s the difference between the Strike King Zero and the Ocho other than the Ocho’s eight sides?

VanDam: The Ocho is my go-to stick worm. Constructed of the Perfect Plastic, it has an incredible action, and with the salt component, it almost shimmies as it falls through the water columns. It’s heavier and designed for a different purpose than the Zero. The new Perfect Plastic Ocho comes in the 5- and the 7-inch size, and because it has a lot of weight, you can cast it further than you can cast the Zero. My favorite way to fish the new Perfect Plastic Ocho is to rig it Texas-style without a weight and cast it around shallow targets. This is an extremely-deadly springtime lure and excellent spawning-season bait.

I also like to rig the Ocho wacky style with a Mustad Weedless Wacky hook, flip it out and twitch it along. It really has an incredible action. I also Texas-rig the Ocho with a slip sinker. If you’ll be rigging the Ocho Texas-style, use the lightest slip sinker you can find. I’ll flip it, pitch it, cast it and fish it on deep weedlines, deep structure and around boat docks. If I’ll be using a weight, I’ll use a very-small weight like a 1/8- or a 1/4-ounce bullet weight in front of the Perfect Plastic Ocho. It gives the bait a really-subtle, gliding fall. This has been a deadly-effective bait for me. Too, I’ve found that I can fish this lure on a Shaky Head jig. Normally, I fish the finesse worms on the Shaky Head jig. I prefer the 5-inch Ocho when I’m fishing it on the Shaky Head jig. There’s just something about the way the Ocho moves when you shake it that causes the bass to bite.

Question: Kevin, how do the eight sides of the Ocho make this bait move?

VanDam: Because the Perfect Plastic Ocho is loaded with salt, as it falls, those eight-different sides cause the bait to shimmy and wiggle. If you take the 3X Zero and rig it and the Perfect Plastic Ocho, put them both in a fish tank and watch them fall, you quickly and easily can see the difference in the way the two lures move as they descend down into the water and you need both movements when you’re fishing.

Next: The Game Hawg

Contents:

• Part 1: The Super-Buoyant Perfect Plastic
• Part 2: The Game Hawg
• Part 3: The Rodent
• Part 4: The Caffeine Shad
• Part 5: The Coffee Tube and the Rage Craw