By: Dan Carns
This is for all my freshwater peeps (Johnny Sullivan)) and for anyone who is curious about the new Urchin Bait. The Japanese tackle builders are always inventing new and creative ways of catching fish but this one is different.
The Senco took the fishing community by storm as did the Chatter bait. Both of these are still in most anglers tackle boxes and are part of their everyday arsenal. Some trendy baits are purely promotional and don’t really stand the test of time. Every now and then a new bait comes along that takes the tournament series by storm and this one has created a tsunami! Designed by Hideup tackle maker, The Coike is the original. This urchin style soft plastic looks nothing like anything before it and also doesn’t appear to look like anything in the water. There are now a slew of companies jumping on this bait bandwagon and some are just not worth the money.
After purchasing a bunch of different knock-offs as the Coike’s are almost impossible to find and third-party sales are upwards of $100.00 dollars apiece, I found one that really performed exceptionally, made by Yamamoto Baits, The Uni in green/purple outperformed all the others that I bought. Some were smaller and some were very big but the Uni seems to be just the right size and this color combo worked especially well. This bait is made from TPE plastic so it floats and is almost indestructible but like ZMann plastics it will melt all the other plastic baits in your tackle box!
I had the chance to fish this bait in amazingly clear water in a bunch of different locations. Due to water clarity I could get a great read on how it performed in all the various ways that I rigged it and how the fish were reacting to it as well. First of all, due to the fact that it floats I decided to drive a 1/0 circle hook just under the bait skin so that most of the hook was exposed. There are a bunch of lost fish reports due to hookup failure. On my first cast this bait wasn’t in the water more than a second when a Largemouth Bass exploded on it. I released this fish and on the second cast the same thing happened only this time it was a beautiful Smallmouth bass! Eventually I was able to learn to surface twitch and pause this bait long enough for the fish to respond. Five casts and five fish convinced me that the hype was warranted. I wanted to let this bait drop down through the water column so inserted a nail weight and it literally shimmers on the way down. The Uni rarely made it all the way down before a fish would inhale it. As you can imagine, I am convinced that this new style Urchin bait is the real McCoy!
It’s A Wild World-Get Out There!
@paddlinandfishin
Dan Carns