Entry 306-1

Top Angler Kevin VanDam Goes Soft with Strike King Lures

Part 4: The Caffeine Shad

Question: Kevin, what’s a Caffeine Shad?

VanDam: The Caffeine Shad is a soft-plastic jerkbait, but we’ve enhanced the design of the Caffeine Shad. This Perfect Plastic Caffeine Shad is designed and built to have a horizontal fall rather than a nose-first fall and not glide. It’s specifically designed and weighted with salt to give it a horizontal fall, which is quite different from most soft-plastic jerkbaits. Because of the tail and the body design and the extremely-soft plastic we’re using, as the Caffeine Shad starts to fall, it shimmies or quivers like a dying shad. If you’ve ever noticed shad dying, they’ll often start to sink horizontally and just quiver a little bit.

Strike King took what we saw in nature and reproduced that action in the new soft-plastic Caffeine Shad. This bait has a quivering action similar to the Ocho. I can twitch the Caffeine Shad along really fast like I will a soft-plastic jerkbait. Then I’ll kill the bait. It has that unbelievable action and horizontal fall like no other soft-plastic jerkbait.

I finished second at Lake Dardanelle using this lure. A good friend was fishing in the same area, using a competitor’s brand of this same type of lure. The difference in the way the two lures performed was like the difference between night and day. I learned that I had to twitch the bait along and get the bass to follow the bait. Then when I’d kill the bait and let it fall, the bass would attack.

Question: What’s the difference in this bait and Strike King’s Zulu?

VanDam: The Caffeine Shad has a much-faster sink rate than the Zulu, and it can be cast much further without lead than the Zulu. The Zulu has been designed to be really buoyant and to be worked either on the surface or within the first 1 or 2 feet of the water column. The Zulu is much better when you’re fishing for active bass and using a fast retrieve to get those active fish to bite. The Caffeine Shad works better when you want to work the bait fast, kill it and then have the bait fall horizontally.

The best attribute of the Caffeine Shad is the way the lure falls after you kill it. Both the Zulu and the Caffeine Shad are designed for different types of fishing conditions and various moods of the bass. If all lures had the same action, fall rate and swimming ability, you’d only need one lure and you’d catch far-fewer bass. At Strike King, we design lures to fit particular niches in the bass-fisherman’s arsenal of lures. The new Caffeine Shad gives the fishermen a different tool to use to catch bass.

Next: The Coffee Tube and the Rage Craw

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