A new paddletail

I’ve loved the action and productivity of paddletailed baits for years when it comes to crappies and sunfish with the Culprit bait being my favorite. The Slider is another quality product but the tail button, or paddle, is really clunky on the Slider baits in both the 1.5″ and the 2″ styles. There have been some other attempts to come up with paddletail designs that will work without the bulk but most have simply not been able to get around the large round tail button. Until now.

I found a mold a few days ago that appeared to have what I wanted in tail design so I ordered it and man, is every a dandy find.

The baits it shoots are smack on at two inches. The tail button is very much like Culprit’s old paddletail design and is at the end of a really flexible filament of plastic so it should have a lot of action. With the river behind our house open I’ll be checking this one out this afternoon.

The colors in the pictures are just re-melts to see how the mold shot and some two color shots were made to see how much a guy can manipulate things and all I can say is I am going to like this guy….especially with a real soft plastic.

I tried to get the tail sections pictured fairly close and clear but the breeze made these things move even. The bottom pic gives a good idea of what the tail button looks like.

Looks good

Sweet!

So are you selling any of these items you’ve been showing us or just making us jealous???

can I try some?!

Quote:

---

Sweet!

So are you selling any of these items you’ve been showing us or just making us jealous???

---

Check his profile

I got some questions about the color of one of these and it is not motor oil nor amber atop of the chartreuse, its actually junebug, but because the junebug layer is thin and the sun is shining thru it it looks like motor oil in color. The bait was moved by the wind just an instant before I hit the shutter button.

I took my walk to the river behind me yesterday and had one of these babies rigged on a 1/32 head sporting a #6 sickle hook. The drop rate was really nice and the bait swims very well. Its pretty streamlined and it doesn’t appear to have a lot of water resistance but then its hard to tell with the wind and current. As imagined, the tail on this bait is almost dizzying at a moderate rate of retrieve.

When I ready to head back home I pinched off just the very end of the tail so the button was gone and made another couple casts. With the button gone and the tail stem being slightly tapered from body to end this made for a really sweet acting stinger type tail so the potential for this being a two-in-one kind of bait is pretty strong. No fish yesterday but this plastic was flat out eye candy to watch in the water.

Every now and then a color that is hot for walleyes will pop up that turns out to be a smoker for slabs as well. Here is one.

There are differences in this color scheme that set it apart from others more common to the walleye world. Both the chartreuse and the clear base have some violet hi lite added to hold some light in the plastic instead of it just passing thru. You can see the purplish sheen in the plastic on the right. The same will show up in certain light in the tail color too. The glitter colors are a bit different as well. Copper in lieu of any silver is included along with green, blue and purple…no red. Friday maybe will find me down around Alma snooping to see if this color is a keeper. I’m thinking it is.

I got to dinking again today and made up a bunch of these for the open water season which I guess has already started. I hung one on a 1/32 jig and headed to the river behind the house and found my old buddy the wind already there and he made my casting the light jig a real pain. I did manage to snare one half decent crappie along a bridge piling that kind of surprised me in being about 11 inches. Most of what I see are around nine inches…or less.

The purple here is a color that I decided to tweak a little to try and get a bit more transparency out of and I guess I like it a lot.

Tom, great job on those plastics

Keep the ideas rolling, you’ve really got some winners there

I spent the morning at Alma in the boat and found out the walleyes and sauger really like the purple/chartreuse tailed one shown earlier in this thread.