Bass fishermen are kind of funny. They’re so much like that guy sitting in the back row, wise-cracking after every critical point in a presentation. Or if not that, ungraciously accepting the results of uncommon problem solving, as if those solutions grew on vines.
Robo’s Greg Stump knows something of the feeling. Speaking of his sophisticated EZ Shad he said, “We finally perfected the technology to make these things three colors, to inject three colors consistently–that took a long time.”
Yet time never stands still in the lure business, Greg noted. “In the meanwhile, tube swimbaits got hotter than hell, and that’s the reason I wanted to make a similar one, but without all the complaints: like they weren’t consistent in their shape; they way they were packaged you would get a kink in the body; fished with a light weight they would have problems; and hook-up ratio.
“I started playing with them and I wondered why the hollow body? The first thing I did was slice the slit in the belly to limit having to push through two levels of plastic.”
Then after looking at a number of other models, he picked out features that made the most sense. In fact, he told me, “I combined everything I wanted to do and came up with all the solutions to (troublesome) things I had heard (about.) I took the best features of all the others.”
Yet while swimbaits are relatively simple in concept, all the balance and motion properties have to be in harmony. “Said Greg, “We’ve gone through seven or eight different designs for the right swimming action,” before settling on the bell-shaped tail. But the other details are exclusive to Roboworm. “With my technology I can put more fins on them, make them thinner and more realistic.” In fact, the dual fin on either side of the hook slit on the back of the bait protects from snagging in heavy cover, but does not impair hook-setting.
It was this ability to fish the lure in cover that became a core objective, along with creating a functional and easy-to-use swimbait. Of course, that didn’t deter some bass guys from blowing off the cover concept, inserting a Mojo weight into the belly cavity, and adding a nice big treble hook for fishing “open water.” Perhaps that’s a testament to the fact the bait is so well designed, it can be fished that way in addition to being fly-lined like a fluke, fished with a jig head so it stands on its nose, plus the way it was primarily designed for: with a weighted 5/0 wide-gap hook–with its point protected.
While boaters can take the EZ Shad to the extreme back water snag zones, what the lure design does is open up the swimbait mode in every possible “uphill” presentation. Says Greg, “It’s the ultimate shore-fishing bait. You can let it sink to the bottom and fish it all the way back.”
And Robo did it. But it wasn’t easy.
Roboworm is the best!!!