Interesting excerpt from an article on crankbaits (message me for link to the original article; it's good).
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David Fritts’, Mr. Crankbait, contends, that not all crankbaits are made alike. That only special baits, generally 5 or 10 out of 100, possess such characteristics. He jokingly says that they were made at 11:30 on Wednesday morning, when the workers were performing at their highest levels. Well, he was right. Mr. Fritts’ also contends, that when he finds one of these baits, he puts it in a special place, and of his special baits, he claims he would not take $1000 for any one of them. I have to agree with him on this assertion. I have 34 baits that I consider special. These are the baits I use when I need to catch fish. A short observation is in order. In September 2002, a friend asked me to help him pattern some fish for an upcoming big money tournament. He said we would be fishing mostly crankbaits. From the back of his boat, my big 5 fish weighed 15-9, while his big 5 fish weighed in around 2.5 lbs. All small dinks, that were under the size limit for Texas. THAT is what I consider a special crankbait. Now, back to David Fritts theory, lets do the testing now.
Pool testing at one facility revealed, that out of 100 identical crankbaits (not the same color, but the same body style and type) only 7 were considered to have the unique actions that catch more fish, according to the test anglers. These lures dove quicker, stayed down longer, went a little deeper, ran straighter, and/or came up on a steeper angle when nearing the point of retrieve.
Twenty-two additional test baits were considered almost perfect, but needed some additional testing/modifying to get them to that special level. Many lures never reached the desired level of performance, and unfortunately, these are often part of the lures sold in stores. Even after extensive tuning, some of the 22 baits never made it into the SPECIAL category, but they still exceeded the other 71 baits in performance on the water.
The on water application of these 100 baits was quite startling. The original 7 special baits, out caught the next 22, at about a 5 to 1 ratio. The 22 baits that were close, out caught the remaining 71, by about a 3 to 1 ratio. Was this due to applications? Or was it true that these special 7 had some unseen attributes? Or were we fishing them differently, with more confidence? Perhaps, but the final numbers made believers of the 2 of us. These tests were run in the spring, summer and early fall of 1999. We always had one of the 7 tied on, and then went through the other 22, then the 71. So, it couldn’t be done in a shorter time period with 2 people fishing both at the same time. Did the differences in season effect our results? Well, remember, we always had one tied on, and we fished one of these 7 against all the other baits, rotating about every 30 minutes on the other baits, and about every hour on the 7. Another startling observation, was that the big 7, didn’t catch near as many short or under fish. Most of them were keepers, not so the other 93. We never kept weight numbers, but did measure each fish. We made at least 500 casts with each bait.
So, did we fish the 7 that much more than the others? Yes we did, but we were keeping track of casts and fish caught within certain time periods.. The 7 still won, hands down. We then tried to identify what made them special (an exercise in futility). We even X-rayed the 29 baits, dry rattled them for distinctive sounds, examined with a magnifying glass. We never found anything that we could identify that made them special, except the qualities mentioned above.
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More expensive baits are generally more consistent. If I lose a Lucky Craft crankbait that I caught a bunch of fish on, I know I can buy another of the same model and go back to catching fish. If it's a Strike King (just an example, sorry SK fans); maybe, maybe not.
