Entry 306-1

Top Angler Kevin VanDam Goes Soft with Strike King Lures

Part 5: The Coffee Tube and the Rage Craw

Question: Kevin, is the Coffee Tube a gimmick, or is it really a new type of tube that offers the angler a well-defined advantage?

VanDam: I’ve been fishing the Coffee Tube for several more years than Strike King has been selling them. I wanted to know for myself that this was a better tube that Strike King or anyone else had, and that it definitely solved a fishing problem and gave fishermen an advantage. Strike King built the Coffee Tube in a flipping model and in a 3-1/2-inch model that could be used with a jighead. I put jigheads in the Coffee Tubes and used them for drop-shot fishing and flipping.

These tubes have a different type of fall than other tube jigs. With a light jighead or a light weight, the Coffee Tube has a slow, spiraling type of action. With a heavy head or a heavy weight, the Coffee Tube will fall really fast. The Coffee Tube is one of my mainstay soft-plastic lures. I probably carry more tubes than any other soft-plastic bait. It’s an extremely-versatile bait and catches a lot of bass.

Too, the new Coffee Tube comes in a wide variety of colors. For instance, when we’re fishing in the Great Lakes, we’ve got Coffee Tubes that mimic the goby, one of the bass’s primary forages in those lakes. Then we’ve got black and black-and-blue Coffee Tubes that I use when I’m fishing for largemouths in southern waters. We’ve got colors of Coffee Tubes that resemble a crawfish. When you drag it on the bottom, the Coffee Tube looks just like a crawfish with more tentacles.

You can hop the Coffee Tube really fast and make it look like a baitfish trying to escape. You can flip it because it’s compact, and it will dive through any hole in the cover. Or, you can skip it under docks. There’s hardly any place not appropriate to fish a tube. With the Coffee Tube, a bass will hold on longer when the fish bites because of the salt content and the coffee flavoring, giving your more time to get a good, solid hook set.

One of the problems I’ve had with the Coffee Tube is when I’m fishing tournaments, during the practice time, I’ll take the Coffee Tube and try to find bass with it. I want the bass to bite the tube, so I can know the bass is there. But then I want to be able to pull the tube away from the bass, so I don’t hook it, and I can catch it during the tournament. I’ll rig the Coffee Tube with a hook, but I’ll cut the point off it. I’ve had bass take that Coffee Tube, and I’ve twitched it and jerked it to let them know I’m on the other end of the line. Many times they still don’t give up that bait.

The bass just don’t want me to take that bait away from them. If they drop the Tube, often they’ll come back and bite it again. That’s exactly what I want them to do on tournament day when I’ve got a hook in that Coffee Tube. This is the reason we’re putting coffee flavoring in all our soft-plastic lures, including the Strike King Rage line of soft plastics, which have been very successful.

Question: From where did the idea of coffee come?

VanDam: Salt has been a component in soft-plastics for a long time, but coffee is a new kid on the block in fish attractants. Some of the lure designers at Strike King noticed that all the bait farms that raise worms for fishing used coffee grounds in the soil where they grow worms. Therefore, the live worms have a coffee scent or a coffee flavor. Our designers thought that if the real thing (live worms) smelled and tasted like coffee, and bass ate them up, how much better would our soft-plastic lures be if we had that same coffee flavor inside them? We also found that if you sprinkle coffee grounds in the water, little bluegills and minnows will eat those coffee grounds like crazy. Therefore, we learned that coffee is some type of natural attractant to fish.

I don’t know why bass like coffee, because there’s nothing natural that smells or tastes like coffee in the bass’s environment. Maybe the bass know they need caffeine to get going in the morning, like we do. I don’t know why it works, but I’ve seen bass be more aggressive when I’m fishing soft-plastic lures with coffee in them than when I fish the lures without coffee flavoring. I was doing a seminar and standing on top of a tank that had nothing but rainbow trout in it. I pitched a standard tube in the water with the trout, and the trout wouldn’t give it a look. That sort of hurt my feelings, because it was a KVD Tube – my signature lure.

When I took that tube off and put on the Coffee Tube, the trout attacked the bait. Obviously, the trout were coming to the scent of that Coffee Tube, because as you know, trout have a highly-developed sense of smell. So, I don’t really have to understand why the coffee flavoring in the Coffee Tube catches more fish than a tube without coffee. All I really need to know is that the coffee flavoring in the Coffee Tube catches more bass than the tube without the coffee flavoring. I use the Coffee Tube. It helps me catch more bass and do well in tournaments, and that’s the main thing I’m concerned about and you should be, too.

Question: Another new soft-plastic Strike King has introduced is the Rage Craw. What is it?

VanDam: The Rage Craw is Strike King’s version of a highly-active plastic crawfish. The Chunk is designed to be a jig trailer,, and the Craw is designed to be fished either weightless or Texas-rigged with a slip sinker. However, I use the Rage Craw as a trailer on my jig because the Rage Craw is bigger and longer than the Rage Chunk. I like that bigger presentation for my jig trailer. I also Texas-rig the Rage Craw and fish it like it’s a worm or a creature bait.

I like the action of the Rage Craw when you pull it through the water at a fast pace. The Rage Craw flaps and kicks harder than any tail action on any soft plastic I’ve ever seen. Also, if you reel it really slowly, those pincers and legs are still kicking. That’s what you want in a crawfish bait like this or on the end of your jig hook as a jig trailer. I prefer to fish the Rage Craw on the back of a Football Jig because it’s got more action than any other trailer.

When I’m fishing it on the back of a swimming jig, the pincers and the legs kick as hard as spinner-bait blades. That’s what has made the Rage Craw and the Rage Chunk the No. 1 flapping crawdad trailer on the market today, and the Rage Craw has obtained that status in a very-short time. I almost don’t use anything else on the back of a jig except the Rage Craw. I prefer to use the Denny Brauer Chunk when I want a much-more subtle action on the back of the jig. It’s especially deadly in cold water. But when the weather warms-up, I’m either using a Rage Craw or a Rage Chunk on my jigs, and I’m Texas-rigging it.

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