Fishing Handmade Lures, 2009 Edition

Fishing Handmade Lures, 2009 Edition

Last year, I opined that there is nothing as fun as fishing with lures you've crafted yourself. For many years, I tied flies and got that special rush you only get when you get a fish to rise to something you've crafted from hand.

Lately, however, I've been in to making lures. At first I made larger plugs, suitable for pike and musky fishing, and had an absolute blast doing it. The past several years, though, I've really gotten into crafting fly rod lures. Here's a few of the ones that have worked best over the past five years:


A selection of hand-made lures, including my favorite floating turtles.

Do they catch fish? Darn right they do, and big ones too. These lures were mostly designed for fishing bass topwater, so they are awkward to cast with a fly rod. My brother has utilized a neat hybrid method of fishing them that allows you to still use the fly rod, with all of its wonderous properties, and yet cast these babies further than you can with a traditional fly line.

We use medium weight composite fly rods--8.5' to 9' in length--and small spinning reels with 4 pound test line. It takes some getting used to having the spinning reel at the end of the reel seat, but with some practice you can heave these little lures 50 feet or more with ease.

Are they effective? You be the judge. Here I am with an average Northern Wisconsin smallmouth of around 16". It hit the lure at the bottom right of the picture above--a balsa wood minnow with a swan tip tail--so hard it was amazing. It came out of the water on several occasions, and fought like a titan. What a beauty!


A heckuva nice smallmouth.
The skeptics among you might be saying "well, how do we know he caught the fish on a lure he made?" It didn't occur to me until that night when my dad asked the same question. So the next morning, I hit a secret hot spot early armed with my favorite style lure. It's a 2.25" Pikie Minnow look alike carved from pine, with two small size 16 trebles. I also make this lure with through wire construction out of cedar, which is lighter, but I wanted a little heft to be able to cast out where the fish were from shore. Here's what happened:


Almost immediately, the Fishing Gods smile. Fish On! My buddy Marc, camera in hand, captures the action.


Fightin' like a monster. I'm hoping I can keep it on. We battle for five minutes like this.


First sight--It's a big one. A REALLY big one. Hey, what's that hanging out of its mouth?


With four pound test line, I probably only have one chance to lip this baby. Can we zoom in an see what enticed this denizen of the depths to so viciously strike?


Yes. Yes we can. I know the suspense is killing you...


Got it! 20 inches of fightin' northern Smallmouth. My streak of nine consecutive years with a 20" or bigger smallie is still alive!


Close up of my favorite fish in the whole world...but can we get any closer?


Yes. Yes we can.


After removing the lure, the bass swims back to the depths, to fight another day.

All joking aside, my point in putting together this little photo essay is to show that anyone can make their own lures, and with a little practice, can catch fish on them. Even big fish. And trust me when I say I am in no sense a talented luresmith like many out there. If I can do this, I promise that you can, too. And you'll have fun doing it!

If anyone's interested, I can put a photo essay together on how to make this effective little fly rod Pikie wannabe lure. It's surprisingly easy and requires only a few tools. I've taken a lot of fish on them on many colors, although I definitely prefer black head/white for immediate post-spawn bass.

Lots more from my last fishing trip--including catching fish on a composite, glass, and bamboo fly rod all in the same day--but that will have to wait for another post.

-- Dr. Todd

Fishing Handmade Lures, Part II

Fishing Hand Made Lures, Part II:

Home Made Lures That Work

The biggest step in fishing with your own lures is convincing others that they catch fish. This is particularly true if your fishing companions include (1) the best fisherman in the world (your father); (2) the most skeptical young angler on earth (your daughter); (3) a man who only fishes once a year and really, really wants to catch fish (one of your best friends); (4) a girl who doesn’t really want to go fishing (your niece); and (5) the only witness to the time you put a dremel through your thumb trying to drill a pilot hole in a fishing lure (your wife). Not the most forgiving of crowds.

So if you’re going to try and convince others to fish with your lures, you better darn well bribe them ahead of time. A trip to Park Point in Duluth, Minnesota worked wonders in putting everyone in the proper mood for fishing with my home made lures.


Two completely divergent opinions about sitting on the beach WITHOUT a fishing rod in your hand.

WAY too happy for people NOT fishing.
Having gotten the beach thing finally out of the way, it was time to hit the Northern Wisconsin waters for a second go around. The first (as chronicled yesterday) was a great success, with the Orange Crackleback Neodingbat (as I call it) hammering the northern pikes. As an aside, I discovered first hand the reason that you find so many tack-eyed lures like Paw Paw, Best-o-Luck, and Horrocks-Ibbotson without paint on the eyes. A day of hard fishing and all the paint on the Neodingbat’s eyes were gone.


Getting prepared for a day on the lake.
This day we were after bass—smallmouth bass, to be exact. The first person I attempted to convert was my eight-year old daughter, who is already a highly skeptical person. When I put the Diving Grasshopper, as I call my creation, on her rod she looked at me like I had tied on a dead rat. “What in the world would eat THAT,” were her exact words. Touché, little one. Touché.


The Traditional Todd’s Turtle (left) and the Diving Cricket (right)
The Diving Cricket was carved out of red cedar, so it is a buoyant little bugger. About 2 ½ inches long, it has hook holders on both sides and long shank single hooks. Why, you might ask? Because they look cool. The lure would probably be more effective if it had the hook holder on the bottom, but then it wouldn’t look like a grasshopper, would it? Sometimes form wins out over function. With a mouthpiece made from a folded-over Colorado spinner blade, this little bug dives about three feet deep and wobbles with a wide wiggle. I thought the bass would go crazy for it.

I was wrong. It’s not that the lure didn’t work, it just wasn’t the best choice of lures for this early in bass season in Northern Wisconsin. The daughter began grumbling early when our fishing companion—who was NOT fishing a Dr. Todd special—began to take bass. As dad was fishing the Turtle (with little success I might add), it seemed like she would lose faith in her father’s creation.


Daughter taking a break from fishing the Diving Cricket.
Fortunately, providence struck at just the right time. Drifting over a sunken island, where the water goes from 12 to 6 feet, the daughter hooked into one of those legendary Northern Wisconsin smallies on the Diving Cricket. Once again, she made her dad proud, fighting the fish to the boat herself. Dad boated the fish, took out the hooks, and then handed it back to the girl for an obligatory photo.


Daughter holding a three pound smallmouth.
The fish could not have hit at a better time. The weather began to turn—it was one of those weird moments where the sun still shone brightly while heavy, dark clouds rolled in.


The weather started getting rough; the tiny ship was tossed. If not for the courage of the fearless crew, the Minnow would be lost.
So we rolled off the lake, having successfully proven that fish could be caught on another home made lure. And with at least one more convert to the idea that you can make fishing lures yourself that really catch fish.

It was not the end, however, of our fishing experiment.

Coming this Saturday: Walleye Fishing with Home Made Lures.

-- Dr. Tod

Fishing Handmade Lures, Part I

Fishing Hand Made Lures, Part I:

Home Made Lures That Work


This year for my northern Wisconsin fishing trip I planned something a bit different. I wanted to see if I could catch fish using only lures that I made with my own hands; this would include flies, poppers, and casting lures. What follows is my chronicle of the good, the bad, and the ugly of fishing with your own tackle.

Making fishing lures has been a hobby of mine for a number of years. While I respect the carvers who make “fantasy” lures, I am more of a traditionalist—if it doesn’t work in the water, it gets rejected. And although some of my lures are original, more or less, there are others that are my homage to the lures of yesterday.

One of my favorite all time fishing lures is the Creek Chub Dingbat, so it was logical that when I began the current batch of carvings, I would make an attempt to fabricate an updated version of this all-time classic.

The first thing to do was to decide what I liked about the Creek Chub version, and what I might change. Having fished a Dingbat before, there were only three things I thought would make it more appropriate for the clear, deep waters of the Northern Wisconsin lakes I frequent. First, I thought I would make it larger as I always felt the Dingbat was a bit on the small size (and the Husky Dinger was basically a different lure). Second, I wanted to make it heavier so that it would both cast further and run deeper. And third, I wanted to increase the size of the diving plate to slightly increase wiggle and diving depth.

I chose a heavy grained pine wood to turn the body, which ended up being slightly rounder and thicker than the traditional lure, and cut the slot for the mouth piece, which would be attached by a screw from below. I made the diving lip from marine brass, and the line tie on the diving plate from a nail. This was followed by a pair of rounded brass tacks for eyes.

After sanding the body, I coated it with a base of primer and then used a dremel to recess the cup hardware and set the screws in with epoxy after having attached a pair of new Mustad trebles. I then decided to paint it in an orange coach dog color. The final step was to take dyed yellow bucktail, drill out two holes for the hair legs, and epoxy them in.

Then it was to the testing pond where the lip was adjusted so the lure ran perfectly. After having ascertained that the design was sound, I turned out three more, two of which I painted green frog and a third that was also painted orange coach dog.



The lure as it appeared after some hard use.

This and a dozen other lures made up my angler’s kit for this trip—a small spinning lure, a grasshopper wobbler, a pikie minnow type, and several others including one of my favorite creations, the Turtle Lure.

It was a beautiful June day when I was first able to break out the Improved Dingbat. I discovered quickly that the lure ran about 16-18 feet deep, with a nice, tight little wiggle that would have made the original proud. It had neutral buoyancy (a nice bonus but one I did not plan).

We arrived off a large weed bed noted for being packed with fish. Literally the first cast and WHAM! A big hit that stopped the lure dead in its tracks. A few minutes later, and a new fishing lure got christened:



Several hours later and a half dozen fish in the boat, and we were satisfied. The first day of the fishing trip with homemade lures was a great success!

Stay tuned for Part II tomorrow.

-- Dr. Todd from Northern Wisconsin