This Northwest Louisiana lake frequently lives up to its name.
There’s a little salt in the freshwater world of artificial lure-manufacturing giant Gary Yamamoto Custom Baits.GYCB, proud maker of the legendary soft-plastic Senko, has made its official entry into the saltwater market with the Yamamoto Swim Bait.
Really, GYCB representatives say, it was a natural progression because Yamamoto bait enthusiasts have been slipping off to fish in salt water with the product line for years.
Now saltwater anglers have something designed especially by GYCB for redfish, speckled trout, California bay bass, Northwest bottom fish, seagoing Pacific salmon, snook and Atlantic stripers, as a recent news release points out.
“At Gary Yamamoto Custom Baits, we believe the new Yamamoto Swim Bait will be the hottest soft bait to hit the market since the Senko,” GYCB president Ken Sasaki said about the new soft plastic. “It’s that productive. Incredible catches have been made with the Swim Bait all through its development.”
Sasaki said the Swim Bait, which is 3 1/2 inches long (a 5-inch model will be introduced this year), has a slimmer belly and more perfect shad or minnow profile than similar soft plastics.
He said its large, graduated tail sections truly make it stand apart from the others.
“This baby swims,” Sasaki said, “and swims hard.”
He said it was designed with one principle in mind — that big fish eat little fish.
It didn’t take long to create the Yamamoto Swim Bait, according to Russ Comeau. Sasaki had the vision for the new soft plastic.
“It was kind of his baby,” Comeau said the first week of June from the company’s office in Page, Ariz.
“That Swim Bait was pretty much nailed on the first try. That particular one we didn’t tweak much,” Comeau said.
Designers knew what they wanted when they started talking about it several years ago, he said. It got put on a backburner for a while because very few freshwater anglers use swim baits.
Then a Louisiana fishing tackle distributor piped up and asked for a soft-plastic artificial lure that would get redfish and speckled trout to open their mouths in the coastal and near-offshore waters of the Sportsman’s Paradise. That company was blown out of business, unfortunately, by Hurricane Katrina last August.
“When you coming out with a swimming Senko?” was the word coming out of this region, Comeau said. People wanted to see what the manufacturer that makes such productive freshwater soft plastics could do when it turned its attention to a swim bait.
GYCB set out to improve on the design and effectiveness of swim baits on the market already, Sasaki said. The company wanted to remove half the material in the belly area and double the surface area of the paddle.
Also, Sasaki worked on the area between the body and the tail to make it more slender than other swim baits, where the design contributed to a stiff tail that affects the paddle moves.
“The beauty of it is the graduated tail,” Comeau said.
The Yamamoto Swim Bait’s tail has more surface area, a series of ridges, that grip the water to make it move.
The prototype was tested last spring. The Yamamoto Swim Bait, which is available in 12 popular colors for saltwater fishing, started appearing on the market over the winter, much to the delight of saltwater fishermen everywhere.
Sasaki said the Yamamoto Swim Bait has gone over to the freshwater side and caught largemouth, smallmouth and Kentucky bass in extensive field tests.
Also, he said, freshwater striped bass, hybrid bass and walleye have fallen for it.
For more information about the Yamamoto Swim Bait, or other GYCB products, call 800-645-2248.
