My Favourite Lure
My Favourite Lure – The Rapala Super Shad Rap
 When Beet magazine recently asked me to write a piece about ‘my favourite lure’ I had no hesitation in naming the Rapala Super Shad Rap. Over the years I have caught so many fish on this deep-bodied baitfish-style wobbler that I regard it as an essential part of my angling equipment. For big predatory fish of all species it simply has to be the ultimate lure and it is so versatile too. Super Shads can be cranked, twitched over weed, worked around heavy structure and trolled – I have even shaved the diving vane off a few old favourites and weighted them so that they become jerkbaits. 
The list of fish that I have caught on Super Shads makes fantastic reading: pike to over thirteen kilos, zander of seven kilos plus, two kilo perch, tarpon over one hundred pounds, big snook, yellow fin tuna, barracuda, king mackerel and lunker grouper have all fallen for its irresistible wiggle. The Mae West of the lure fishing world, this is a full-bodied wobbler with a sexy wiggle that the big predators fall for every time. ‘Come up and see me some time’ it says. And they do. Time and time again.  
Â
When trolled, Super Shads work at a depth somewhere between four and five metres, a critical depth in which to find predators on large lakes and big rivers, making it the perfect choice when you want something big and meaty to tow behind the boat. Straight cranked they can be worked down to around two metres. At their best when cranked and then stopped so that they begin to ‘back-up’ in the water, expect to get hits when the lure is rising as much as when you are cranking. Over shallow weedy areas the lure has the potential to out-fish surface jerkbaits – simply crank a few turns, sweep the rod to twitch the lure (this makes it shiver in the water) and hold onto the rod!
 
Those of you who use the Super Shad regularly might be surprised to hear about its potential as a jerkbait. One of my favourite memories of this lure goes back to a session a few years ago on the Baltic when we (fishing buddy Ed Brown and myself) were fishing with Anders Forsberg at the Vastervik pike camp. On this trip we had taken a gamble, forsaking our usual late-spring trip in favour of an April visit, the idea being that we might catch some big fish prior to spawning. While flying over Sweden, we craned our necks to look at the landscape below only to see ice and patches of snow everywhere. Had our gamble back-fired? Almost!
The first day saw us fishing alongside ice sheets, with the water registering at minus 0.1 degrees on Anders’ echo sounder unit. Nonetheless, despite the freezing conditions, we managed a few pike on neutral density Cobbs jerkbaits fished as deep and slow as we could get them to work. The problem, however, with jerkbaits of this type is that they do not stay down near the bottom and in such cold conditions it was obvious that many of the biggest pike would be lying deep and not moving. We simply knew that if we could get a jerkbait to sink deep and stay deep while being worked we would catch more and bigger fish.The problem was that we had left most all of our deep-working jerkbaits at home!
That night, armed only with a leatherman tool and some old fishing leads, we set about converting some Super Shad Raps into jerkbaits by shaving the bibs off and drilling out bodies in the areas below the hook hangers to allow us to weight them. The lead was smelted down on the stove, poured into the holes we had drilled and then sealed with five minute epoxy. We spent all night doing it, toiling into the small hours and testing our creations in a bucket until eventually we had a few lures that looked like something from Frankenstein’s laboratory with lumps of lead and epoxy hanging off various body parts and yet, critically, sank level and upright when we dropped them into the bucket. Despite their ghoulish appearance we were convinced that they would work. They did! First cast into an icy bay the following morning, I allowed one of the modified lures to sink to the bottom in ten metres of water. Anders was laughing his head off at the sight of these mutant creations but it was me who enjoyed the last laugh. Half way through the retrieve that saw me working the rod downward in small jerks I had a bone-jarring bite. Caught in water that registered less than zero degrees, that pike weighed over thirteen kilos! 
The Pike mentioned above!To demonstrate the versatility of the lure, let me also mention trolling Super Shads off the coast of Cuba where the water temperature is in the high twenties of degrees plus. Tarpon after tarpon have whacked the Super Shad so hard that they internal wire harness has been bent round to right-angles! Due to the bone-hard mouth of the tarpon, many of these fish come off on the first jump but some don’t – if only we could find a way of hanging onto them all!
And of course, closer to home they have proved their worth time and time again. I can think of no better lure for a big zander. Ditto pike. On one of our local trout reservoirs, Super Shads are the only lure that will bring big, lazy pike up off the bottom when they are lying in deep water. Indeed, they are so effective that they often outfish lures that work near the bottom in ten metres of water when the Super Shad works no more than half that depth down.
And what about perch? Sometimes I think we all use lures that are too small for big perch. Experiences with the super shad have convinced me of this – I have lost count of the number of one to 1.5 kilo fish that I have caught on them, with my biggest perch going over two kilos .
I could go on…Â Â
