According to legend, the first fishing spoon was a true spoon—an eating utensil. On a summer day in the early 1800s, the story goes, a young man named Julio Buel was struggling to catch fish on Lake Bomoseen in Vermont. Ready for a lunch break, he put down his rod and picked up a bowl of tapioca pudding.

Sitting adrift in a rowboat, Buel fumbled his spoon into the waters below, only to see it flutter down and vanish, engulfed by a charging fish. On his next outing, Buel brought another spoon, one he’d removed the handle from and had drilled holes for a line tie and a hook. Thus, the spoon came to be.

Buel patented his design in 1848 and went into production a few years later via the J.T. Buel Company, in Whitehall, New York. The successful lure venture was eventually acquired by Michigan’s Eppinger Manufacturing, who introduced its Dardevle in the early 1900s.

Unlike soft plastic baits that undergo constant innovation and modification, the motto for spoons and other metal bass baits seems to be, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” Innovations have been few and, for the most part, only cosmetic. Yet these chunks of brass, lead, steel, and copper continue to sell and, more importantly, catch bass, as well as ever.

Spoons

Many manufacturers offer wobbling spoons based on Buel’s original discovery. Eppinger offers an astonishing array of over 16,000 spoons in sizes ranging from 1/32 ounce to 41⁄2 ounces, and in a variety of shapes and colors.

Although casting-style spoons aren’t generally considered a staple of modern bass fishing, they do catch bass. The Dardevle Crystal Imp was among the hottest bass lures in the south in the 1950s and 60s, says company president Karen Eppinger. “The EPA banned some of the chemicals used to create the bait’s unique scalelike finish, and the rubber worm came out at about the same time, so we lost most of our bass market,” she recalls. Eppinger eventually sought other means of producing its Crystal finish and reintroduced the bait in 1998.

The tendency of casting spoons to snag in thick cover has limited their popularity among bassers. But baits with only two upturned hooks present a temptation rarely seen today to bass lurking on the fringes of grassbeds. They’ve remained a secret bait of top anglers in weedy waters like Lake Seminole and the St. Johns River

Sometimes referred to as “slabs” or “slab spoons,” straight-bodied jigging spoons have undergone fewer changes than any other timeworn lure. Made of lead, steel, zinc, or brass, and typically finished in chrome, noteworthy modifications come in the form of improved hooks and adornment with decals, prismatic tapes, and photo and holographic images designed to increase realism or add color.

Bass N’ Baits Rattle Snakie Spoon incorporated a rattle, a feature proven effective and popular. Northland has added the Buck-Shot Rattle Spoon to its line. Hot new Duh!!! Team Spoons from California feature holographic scale patterns, realistic eyes, and several shapes.

Although anglers reportedly crimped lead onto their lines ahead of Dardevles and vertically jigged them as early as the 1920s, the standard jigging spoon didn’t penetrate the bass market until the 70s, when saltwater anglers started using them for stripers in reservoirs. “Our baits were originally intended for striper fishing in saltwater, but they became popular in South Carolina’s Santee Cooper lakes—Marion and Moultrie—and from there caught on with bass anglers,” says Robbie Roberts, a lure designer for Virginia’s Hopkins Fishing Lures for nearly 40 years.

Also gaining popularity among the growing legions of deep-water savvy bass anglers were the Cordell CC Spoon and Mann’s Mann-O-Lure. Indeed, the proliferation of electronic depthfinders that revealed the exact location of structure, cover, and bass, further increased the effectiveness and popularity of vertically jigging spoons, a pinpoint technique. “The beauty of a jigging spoon, the key to its effectiveness, is that you can put it exactly where you want it and keep it there,” says tournament veteran and noted spoon expert Mike Wurm.

“Spoons often are considered cold weather and hot weather baits, when bass typically are on or near the bottom over deep structure and have a small strike zone. The spoon allows precise placement, and you can keep it in the strike zone as long as you need to,” says the Arkansas pro.

Because of their weight, spoons also excel for schooling bass, Wurm adds. “You can really zing a spoon out there. To get a slower fall, insert a spoon into a tube lure,” he notes. In fact, Wurm says that sheathing spoons in soft plastic tubes also can entice strikes when fishing vertically. “It gives the lure a different look, action, and texture,” he says.

Tailspinners

Designed by Tom Mann in 1960, the Mann’s Little George still ranks as the world’s best known and top-selling tailspinner. Mann, then working as a conservation officer in Alabama, developed the hybrid spoon-spinner for fishing bass in deep holes in his home state’s Pea River. “I designed it to look like a small shad. Lead made it castable and heavy enough for bottom fishing. The spinner blade on the tail balanced the lure and produced sound waves and vibration,” Mann says.

Despite the bait’s diminutive stature, it proved deadly on bass of all sizes. “I also was fishing it on Lake Eufaula, Alabama, out on river ledges, regularly catching stringers of giant bass,” Mann says. “That’s when the bait really took off.” Indeed, the lure maker had his Little George—named after then governor George Wallace—on the market in a month. In the nearly 40 years since, tens of millions of Little Georges have been sold, and many other manufacturers have added similar lures to their inventories.

Like spoons, tailspinners have changed little since Tom Mann’s creation. Most are made of weighty metals such as lead, feature a baitfishlike profile, a Colorado style blade attached to the tail, and a treble hook dangling from the belly. Advances in finish technology have yielded more attractive lures in recent years, at least to the human eye, but guides and tournament anglers generally stick with tried and true blue-white and black-white patterns.

While the appearance and action of the tailspinner remain virtually unchanged, one enhancement has nonetheless sparked a new generation of fans. While fishing with friend Tom Mann in 1968, Bob Ponds observed how easily bass were able to throw Little Georges by thrashing their heads as they jumped. “I asked Tom why he didn’t make his baits slip up the line, and he said that such a design would be so unconventional that nobody would buy them. He was right. When I first designed my Wing Ding in 1969, no one cared about it,” Ponds recalls.

His modification—a small hole bored from the back of the lure to the belly—allows anglers to pass their lines through the bait and tie to a treble hook below. “When the fish jumps, the bait slips up the line, and the weight’s leverage is eliminated, so the fish can’t throw the hook,” Ponds explains.

The Wing Ding design eventually ended up in the hands of Mississippi’s Redneck Lures, where it underwent a slight modification in shape, as well as a name change. They released the “Tail Kicker” in 1978, with satisfactory sales in Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and Louisiana. In 1995, Sunny Wells from Lake Fork spotted the lures in a tackle shop at Toledo Bend and contacted Redneck, offering to sell the baits at Fork, the unquestioned proving ground for lunker bass baits.

Fork’s guides and regulars quickly discovered what Mann had learned years before. Big bass go for tailspinners. Sales boomed and word spread, establishing the Tail Kicker as a premier tailspinner. Hugh Rinkle’s Rinky Dink is another line-through design that dates back to the 1960s, but with modern features. Hart’s Back Flash and Strike King’s Thruster Tail are the latest in the lineup.

Although primarily fished along the bottom and cast for schooling bass, some pros have discovered that tailspinners are effective around weedbeds, ripping them from snags and generating strikes much like a lipless rattling crankbait.

Bladebaits

Likely the least known of the metal baits is the bladebait, another unchanging marvel. These lures have a heavy metal head and thin body of steel, tin, or zinc. The combination produces a tight vibration effective on smallmouth and largemouth bass in deep water.

The Heddon Sonar appeared in 1959 and has remained a staple baits in the PRADCO lineup to this day. Three holes for attaching a snap offer three different running angles and depths, a feature appearing in several newer blades. Scott Stecher added a curve to the blade of his Cicada for a unique vibration. The Luhr-Jensen Ripple Tail is a larger option.

In the 1970s, the Silver Buddy, a simple lead-headed model designed in Kentucky for giant smallmouths in hill-land impoundments, gained a cult following among brown bass aficionados of the region. These baits are favored when water temperatures fall below 55°F.

The Hogeye Blade Runner is a turned bladebait, meaning its sheet metal body runs parallel to the bottom behind a lead head. The Blade Runner apparently is out of production, but Mann’s Mann Dancer is a newer entry in this class, also intended for deep water. Top Brass Tackle’s new 1-ounce X-Shad represents a true innovation in metal baits, a brass rattlebait with rattle chamber and various textured color schemes.

* Russell Browder, Garland, Texas, is a freelance outdoor writer specializing in bass and panfish.