Shoreline anglers know the pain of walking down the bank and needing a different lure only to look up and see the tackle box a good distance down the water’s edge. Scott Burdick and his dad wanted to solve that problem. “My father and I wanted to make a lure like this for over thirty years,” explained Burdick. We were always shore fishing in Illinois on the strip mine property and we got tired of walking down the shore with a tackle box or having to go back after it.”
“We wanted to have our hands free to fish and we wanted to be able to make quick changes in style and color. We wanted a lure that would be good for bass and pike, and we wanted to carry it in our pockets.”
The result of Burdick’s determination to create the lure he dreamed about surfaced at ICAST 2015 in Orlando. The dream was to make a lure with countless configurations that would fit in a pocket sized tackle box. “The challenge was the internal mechanism to hook it all together,” reported Burdick. “We had worked on it from time to time but never did complete it.”
One day after his father passed away Burdick picked up a tangled mess of paperclips that had been fabricated to hold the lures together. The parts were all tangled up just from laying close to each other. “I held them up to the light and at that moment had the thought that what I had would work.”
Burdick, a 30 year geologist and engineer with Caterpillar, followed up on his hunch by cutting off an old broom handle from which he made his first Custom Catcher Lure. “It is all pretty simple,” instructed Burdick. “Each Custom Catcher Lure is a bunch of parts that easily fit together. It is just a loop with a standard split ring attached to the hook that locks the parts together.”
Burdick further explained that each joint of the lure has the wires perpendicular to the part that is attached. The whole scheme is designed to make the parts interchangeable and create different lures. Once you separate jointed pieces, either half can be used separately” explained Burdick. “I can make a lure with a big bucktail, or I can make a weedless popper. I can change the hook out with the feather kit and have different colored popper. There are all kinds of combinations.”
Burdick markets the baits in kits that include jointed minnow and shad baits. All the kits come with 7 different lips, seven different actions, and 7 different depths. “If the lip has no weight it is a suspend bait,” said Burdick. “If you change the lip out and use one with a weight and then it is a sinking bait. If you take the lipless bait you have a surface lure. Every kit has 7 clear lips in it. Besides clear lips you have colored lips available in chartreuse or red. It is the only lure on the market that you can change out the lip and also change the color.” Continue reading – http://www.examiner.com/article/custom-catcher-lures-the-quick-change-artists