Old lures you don’t see or hear about much these days.

brandmoney wrote:

I couldn’t tell you the last time I saw somebody throw a rattl trap.

My buddy and I use rattl traps all the time. It’s one of our go to’s. I have a dedicated set up for them lol.

Lindy shadlings, reef hawgs, suicks

Bearcat89 wrote:

<div class=”d4p-bbt-quote-title”>Hard Water Fan wrote:</div>
Beetle spins and Mister Twisters

I still use those for crappies often.

If someone said to me you have one lure to use the rest of your life I’d choose a black beetle spin with yellow stripes.

Here are a few lures that come to mind:
Creek Chub Pikie
Lazy Ike
Hulla Popper
Heddon Sonar

My Dad and I used to use a lure called a Strip-On trolling for northerns.

When I saw this thread I jotted down 8 lures. You guys have named 5 already. The others are Bayou Boogie (caught ~43 inch muskie on Tonka bass opener many years ago on it), Fat Albert and and Evan’s Shag Spoon. The Shag Spoon is like a little Cleo. We used to get them at Daytons, yes Daytons, in downtown Mpls. in the 70s. Oh and the Vibra Bat lure. An uncle gave me a set of 3, different sizes and colors. The action was rocking up and down. Looked cool but never caught anything on them. Might still have one in the dad’s old tackle box. Here’s a link to what they look like:
https://lurelore.com/vibrabat.html

I wouldn’t call Rat’l Traps something no one uses anymore, maybe the original brand, but that style of lure has been copied over-and-over. Tons of them on the market and I use them a lot for bass and pike. Good for night-time spring walleye, too.

Lazy Ike brings back so many memories. They look so great going through the water but i never really caught anything on them, personally.

One thing you don’t hear much of anymore is the Spoonplug. Those old videos are classic.

Netguy wrote:

We used to get them at Daytons, yes Daytons, in downtown Mpls. in the 70s.

Back in the 50’s/early 60’s Rochester had a Daytons store in the dowtown. The lower level had a sporting goods section that wasn’t bad. They had a really nice gun department. I bought a matching pair of Savage Anschutz rifles in .22 and .22 mag there. Expensive but beautiful guns. Target quality. Ralph Hettig managed the sports department in Daytons back then and he later opened Wild Goose Sports in Rochester, when the Dayton store dropped the sporting goods area, and had that business for several decades before his health forced him to sell.

Strip on spinners, boy does that bring back memories. Basically it was a long steel leader that had a spinner on the front end and a double hook on the back. The end of the leader was formed into a loop so you could take that double hook off. The you’d shove the wire down a minnow’s throat and out his…uh….the other end. Then put the double hook back on and position the tail of the minnow to sit between the hook points. 60 years ago I watched my Dad carefully set this up, making sure the minnow was straight so it wouldn’t spin and twist up his line. Satisfied that it all looked good, he tossed it over the side of the boat. And THEN he realized it wasn’t attached to his line. As it slowly sank out of sight I was just old enough to understand that I needed to stare intently at the far shoreline and act like I had no idea what he just did. I sure miss fishing with my Dad.

Steve

Fuzz-E Grubs

I used the Heddon Sonars up on Hooker Lake last summer. They still work!

Dang, I still use most of these baits. I have a lot of confidence in topwater Hulapoppers and Johnson Silver Minnows.

My all time favorite go-to bait that pretty much always works when nothing else will, isn’t a lure per-se (artificial). But, it certainly doesn’t get talked about much. It’s a two hook nightcrawler harness. It’s getting harder and harder to find them in stores. The ones I do find have spinners and beads on them that I think are more to catch the attention of a bait buyer than the attention of a fish. I’ve been having to tie my own the past several years.

Virgil Ward Bass Buster marabou jigs, especially the red/white or the yellow. Canadian Blue Tail fly jig… both were walleye killers in their day!

Bearcat89 wrote:

<div class=”d4p-bbt-quote-title”>Hard Water Fan wrote:</div>
Beetle spins and Mister Twisters

I still use those for crappies often.

My brother in law ONLY fishes beetle spins on the lake in Northern WI that he and my sister have a cabin on, and he does quite well for his 1 trick pony approach to fishing. He just sent me a picture of a 14.5” crappie last week on a beetle spin.

I had a small Budweiser can with two treble hooks and a bill on it. I don’t think I ever used it but as a teenager in the late 70’s I thought it was cool.

Moss Boss

Who said original Rapalas ?

I still use them often walleye fishing late evening and after dark … trolling over and on the edge of weed flats adjacent to drop offs. They are great … shift the motor into neutral to net a fish and all the other lures pop to the surface. They catch northerns and bass if you don’t keep your trolling speed down.

Anybody ever use a lure called Vivif? Back in the 50’s it was offered in many outdoor publications. Supposedly came from France if I recall. Was guaranteed to catch fish. Of course I had to have one. It was a small, about 3″ long, plastic, minnow shaped lure. I did catch a small pike who managed to destroy the tail section of the lure.

Fred Arbogast and flat fish

fishthumper wrote:

I’ll throw in 2 more that come to mind. The hot – n Tot and the Jitterbug

I put some walleye in my boat last week with Hot-N-Tots and rattle traps. I tossed the kitchen sink that day and we were the only ones who caught some. There are no new mouse traps out there. Just old ones people have forgotten about that came back to the market. Over the years most of the “new” muskie baits were just bigger versions of baits that have been forgotten about or became out of production. It is fun to watch the circle. Oh you made the tail 1 cm longer. Must be new bait. I still use a ton of rattle trap style lures, safety pin spinner baits, and tube baits.

Loved the Poe RC-3 coffin bait.

Miller Wobbler with Pork Rind when he quit making them another guy started to make them and called them Mighty Wobbler they are no longer produced. They were ten times better then the Johnson Silver Minnow. I had a few until someone stole my tackles boxes out of my boat years ago.

jwellsy wrote:

It’s a two hook nightcrawler harness. It’s getting harder and harder to find them in stores. The ones I do find have spinners and beads on them that I think are more to catch the attention of a bait buyer than the attention of a fish. I’ve been having to tie my own the past several years.

They are still around, can’t remember where I got them but just bought several, I even found some 3 hook ones.

Johnson Silver Minnow is my new favorite “old lure”. Found a big one hung-up in a tree at the cabin a few years back. No idea why someone would just break the line rather than to take a second to boat-up and get his/her lure back. But I got a free red/white pattern Silver Minnow out of the deal. There it sat in my tackle box for probably 6 or 7 years, until last year in Canada fishing for big pike. Was getting a lot of follows dragging top-waters over the tops of cabbage, but no commits. So I decided to try and get down in the weeds a bit, and no better heavy spoon in my tackle box is better in the weeds than the silver minnow. Put a big twister trailer on it and BAM! My PB pike was in the boat a few minutes later.

ThunderLund78 wrote:

So I decided to try and get down in the weeds a bit, and no better heavy spoon in my tackle box is better in the weeds than the silver minnow. Put a big twister trailer on it and BAM! My PB pike was in the boat a few minutes later.

Yeah I still have one and it was good for big pike and caught a few good bass on it back in the day. It’s probably been a decade or better since I tied it on, since I rarely target either species.

I still love the Johnson Silver Minnow. I realize there are newer copies of the lure that are probably better (even Joe Bucher is making one now), but as to the orginal, what other lure works so well in shallow weeds and only costs six bucks? Real pork rinds can’t be found now but I dress them with fake pork strips from a company called “Fat Cow”. Those strips work FAR better than twister grubs and are nearly as tough as original pork rinds. One thing to know is that Silver Minnows are made in China now and the quality control sucks. It’s often necessary to bend the hook outward so that the hook point is aimed in an effective direction instead of being re-curved back toward the body of the lure. If you miss hookups with this lure, that’s why. On that note, some days with pike, fish after fish will snap at the fake pork rind and get their teeth snagged and it seems like they are hooked but they get loose. Other days, fish after fish will inhale the thing. It seems all pike in the lake share the same mood on a given day, regarding exactly how they attack this particular lure.

Someone mentioned the Red-Eye Wiggler. Back in the early 70s the family of a buddy of mine had a cottage on a shallow weedy lake up north, and almost the only lure anyone on that lake used for when fishing for northerns was this one.

Also in the early 70s, I learned from a friend of my dad’s about a lure called the “Bass Charger”. It was hard plastic with a shape like that of the main part of a modern plastic frog, and had a pair of eyes to add to the froggy appearance. It had a single hook on each side attached at the back, mounted so they could pivot up and down a bit and with the hooks curving up and slightly outward. You’d attach a pork strip to a little screw head on the back of the lure and that strip would feed out through a slot at the back to trail out between the two hooks. It was supposed to be quite weedless but that aspect of the design could have been accomplished more effectively with a single hook mounted right on top of the body (the idea of their design was for the paired hooks to work even if fish struck only at the pork strip and not the entire lure). Anyway, they worked well, back in the days before the idea of the modern plastic frog took hold. I think they were made by a one-man shop in southeastern Wisconsin.

The River Runt has already been mentioned, and it was a favorite of my dad’s when he was very young (he’s 96 now), probably because they were super popular back then. I saw a guy on YouTube who made an episode on classic lures, and he was literally slaying the smallmouth bass in a tiny stream with a River Runt. And I saw Jeremy Wade catching fish on a River Runt in some exotic country during one of his “River Monsters” episodes! (I think he was catching bait or just doing a little casting for fun, but I can’t recall). I guess Mr. Wade is old enough to have used that lure in his youth and thus maybe he still had a few of them.

Regarding “Hellbender” being a cool name for a lure, many of you might know that that’s actually the name of an American species of salamander. I guess the folks at Whopper Stopper thought the name was cool also.

x2 on the bass oreno. I had two of them from my grandpa that he purchased 50+ years ago. Last year the line broke on the last one I had. It was one of the only top waters that I could do a few different retrieves with consistently. Great lure.

Some years ago, I decided to see what it was like to fish a bunch of old lures from the past. Some of these lures I recall using back in the 1970s when I was a kid, some of they I had never personally used and I only knew of because my dad (now 84) had them in his collection.

So one year up at Camp Kendall in the Canadian sub-arctic fishing camp owned by the late, great Kendall Paler (KWP on these forums), dad and I blew the dust off the old-school steel tackle box with the accordion trays and went at it.

– Lazy Ike. These were a mainstay of Mississippi River fishing when I was growing up. My dad lost a HUGE walleye on the river on an Ike, the fish was hooked only on the back hook and the lure snapped in half at the net. Anyway, the Lazy Ike is definitely in the “still got it after all these years” category. Get them to run right and the walleyes were all about them. Color didn’t seem to matter.

– Flatfish – My dad terrorized the walleyes in NE South Dakota with these plugs all through the late 1960s. Those lakes were ideal because many are relatively shallow which is this plug’s sweet spot.

I had never personally fished these, but I understand they are still a favorite out in the PNW for a variety of fish. Fishing them was quite an experience, they really have a distinctive action and require the right boat speed. Obviously, thier unique hook setup makes them fussy and they will catch any weeds within a mile of your location. The walleyes were not that impressed, but the northerns were all over these things. We got some walleye, but I suspect we weren’t getting down to the preferred depth and the walleye probably got tired of standing in line with the snot rockets to hit the flatfish. Getting fish unhooked from these plugs is a complete clusterf#ck.

– Sonars – These were a slam dunk when drifting deeper water. No problem getting fish with these classics. They were not as effective as live bait rigs, but they held their own with jigs. We even got a whitefish. Coincidence?

– Fat Raps – Anybody remeber these? The first deep-deep running plug from Rapala. My dad cried every time he had to buy these in the 1970s, I believe they went for $2 then, which would have been crazy if they hadn’t worked so damn well. Needless to say, these were another slam dunk. Canadian walleyes didn’t know they were retro, they just knew they were dinner.

– Redeye spoons. I don’t think anybody mentioned these, they are a spoon with big red glass bead eyes. Keeping them out of snags was about as much trouble as keeping the snot rockets off these things. Not a fair test because they were tough to fish and we were really targeting the wrong species.

– Mooneye Shad – Worked, but we could only get one of them to run correctly. Very similar to a modern-day Flicker Shad but more difficult to tune.

It was fun to get these old lures out and give them a go.

Re the Silver Minnow, these are still a go-to with guides in the big pike lakes in northern Canada. Keeps the sports from getting hung up in the weeds all day on every cast.

Was there anything tougher than trying to get a dried pork strip off a Johnson silver minnow

ThunderLund78 wrote:

Johnson Silver Minnow is my new favorite “old lure”. Found a big one hung-up in a tree at the cabin a few years back. No idea why someone would just break the line rather than to take a second to boat-up and get his/her lure back. But I got a free red/white pattern Silver Minnow out of the deal. There it sat in my tackle box for probably 6 or 7 years, until last year in Canada fishing for big pike. Was getting a lot of follows dragging top-waters over the tops of cabbage, but no commits. So I decided to try and get down in the weeds a bit, and no better heavy spoon in my tackle box is better in the weeds than the silver minnow. Put a big twister trailer on it and BAM! My PB <strong class=”ido-tag-strong”>pike was in the boat a few minutes later.

That brings back a memory of the first Johnson Silver Minnow that I ever owned. I was in my teens, fishing on a small river in ND and I was proud of my new Johson Silver Minnow. On my very first cast, I cast it too hard and got it caught high up in branches in a tree across the river. My only choice was to break the line and leave it hanging in the tree.
I lost it before it even hit the water.
Talk about heartbreak.

Five of diamonds spoon was a good one too (Len Thompson or Daredevil brands). Silver minnow, daredevil, mepps spinners were also great baits I haven’t used in years.