Story by Ken Duke
No one knows how many fishing lures have been designed to catch the Micropterus genus over the past 150 years or so, but even a conservative estimate would put that number well into six figures.
We could debate the greatest lures in bass fishing history for days or weeks without making any meaningful progress, but it’s easy to come up with the short list of candidates. Just look at our tackle boxes—mine and yours—and see which lures we have in common, which basic designs have been copied most often, which baits we have both caught fish on, and which lures we bought early in our angling lives that we are still buying today.
It wouldn’t take long to create that “short list,” but now let’s focus on the other end of the spectrum—the worst bait ever designed for bass. After quite a bit of research, I believe it’s pretty easy to crown a champion.
Some Caveats
Coming up with a “worst ever” list is not as easy as it seems. After all, almost everything to which an angler might attach a hook could—and probably has—caught a bass. The Micropterus clan is not generally finicky or timid. Bass are generalists and opportunistic. It’s part of why we love bass fishing.
And if you’ve done much bass fishing, you probably have your own stories of the strange things you’ve seen them eat—some animate, some not. Ducks, redwing blackbirds, squirrels, mice, rats, and snakes are all common enough menu items that there are lures in a tackle shop near you designed to mimic them.
And there are times when it doesn’t take much in the way of design or manipulation to catch a bass on an artificial lure. In 1898, the legendary James Heddon, the most famed lure maker in American history, was waiting for friends on the shore of an old mill pond and passing the time by whittling on a piece of wood. As the story goes (and the story is apocryphal, not true—we’ll cover it another time), when he finished whittling, he tossed the stick in the water, and it was attacked by a largemouth bass.
If a mere stick is enough to attract a bass, imagine how bad a lure must be to be the worst ever! It has to be worse than a random piece of wood falling into the water.
A lot of the lures that get mentioned when anglers talk about the worst lures ever made really aren’t that bad at all. The Flying Lure, for example, gets a bad rap. But if you don’t think a jig that glides away from you has value, you’ve never fished a boat dock.
And the old Heddon beer can crankbaits were novelty lures—not something you were supposed to tie on with a tournament on the line. Nevertheless, they’ll catch fish—especially if you throw them in the same places and at the same times, you’d use a square-billed crankbait.
Even the oft-maligned Banjo Minnow is just a variation of a weightless fluke or plastic worm. Put it near an aggressive bass, and it’s going to be eaten.
There’s an old saying among bass anglers: the worst lure fished in the best place will catch more fish than the best lure fished in the worst place.
Whoever said that never fished my pick as the worst lure ever.
But First…
We should start with a few honorable mentions.
The LULU by Captivated Lures of Jacksonville, Florida, (pictured here) was a self-propelled topwater bait with a tiny propeller on the nose. It ran on an AA battery and looked like a child’s toy…except for the treble hooks. The line-tie was at the tail, so the little propeller pulled the monstrosity away from the angler. You could “steer” it with your rod tip—hold the rod to the right and the lure goes left, and vice versa. The LULU was big—more than six inches long—and crashed down on the water like a cement block thrown from a plane. The LULU was so bad that the manufacturer eventually stopped putting hooks on them and turned the “lure” into a cigarette lighter.
Now that’s bad.
My other honorable mention is a legend in the bad lure category from the early 1990s—the Helicopter Lure. For anyone who ever rigged one and tied it on, the Helicopter Lure appeared to be a device that was engineered for no other purpose than to twist line, but legendary tournament pro Roland Martin touted the bait as revolutionary, saying that it was four lures in one—a buzzbait, a spinnerbait, a deep-water lure, and a plastic worm. Problem was that none of them worked very well.
Of the epically bad lures, the Helicopter Lure may have had the biggest marketing budget. Martin produced several television shows and a couple of VHS how-to videos around the bait. You can even find a YouTube video in which a guest on Martin’s show claims to have caught a 19-pound largemouth on the contraption in Mexico.
Yeah, right. It simply didn’t happen. The fish didn’t weigh 19 pounds, and it wasn’t caught on a Helicopter Lure.
Nevertheless, I know some very talented bass anglers who still fish the Helicopter Lure during the spawn to antagonize (and catch) bedding bass. They even tournaments doing it.
That brings us to my pick for the worst bass fishing lure of all-time.
But you’ll have to come back tomorrow for that.
