Along with the Asian carp, the snakehead in recent years has become the favorite aquatic boogieman of the American media. Now that the “Fishzilla” hysteria has died down somewhat, U.S. anglers are learning what we here in Asia have known all along: snakeheads are fun to catch.
U.S. tackle manufacturers are getting in on the action and marketing lures specifically designed for snakehead anglers. Snag Proof, an Ohio-based maker of bass lures, is one such company setting its sights on the snakehead market with the release of its Extreme Frog lure line.
Snag Proof’s specialty is topwater lures, so they understand the shapes and actions that entice predatory fish into surface strikes. As their name implies, they also design lures for throwing to and dragging through heavy cover, the kind of places both bass and snakehead love to hide and ambush prey.
As anyone who has fished both species can tell you, there are differences in the way bass and snakeheads hit a bait. While bass will often inhale a lure into their mouths, snakeheads will snap and slash at it, particularly at any trailing bits like legs or skirts. Every snakehead angler has a collection of soft plastic “amputee” frogs in his tackle box that will attest to this.
With the help of Japanese “snakehead expert’ Shinichi Morikawa of Green Diamond, the tackle company distributing the lures in Japan, Snag Proof have come up with a design they say is more snakehead centric than their other topwater lures, eliminating the skirts to avoid short strikes and make it less likely to hang up in heavy cover.
Hopefully, we’ll be able to get our hands on a few of these and try them out locally. There’s no word as yet of whether they will be showing up in local shops, but Extreme Frogs can be found through both Snag Proof’s U.S. Web site and Green Diamonds Japan site.