The stiffy lures story

By Kaj "Bushy" Busch

I suppose the Stiffy concept was simple enough and a natural progression from our Squidgy soft plastic lures - we wanted to design a range of hard bodied lures from scratch to suit Australian fish and Australian conditions.

Mind you there were a few fairly significant hurdles to overcome - the market for hard bodied lures was and still is overcrowded with good product and our total workforce on the design and prototype production team was one man whose previous experience in designing hard bodied lures was zero.

On the positive side our r and d factory is state of the art with two cordless drills, one dremel tool, lots of sandpaper, some stainless steel wire, one knife and various cans of spraypaint. If the boys at Rapala and Halco could see the factory they would just roll about laughing.

Anyway, we just ignored the negatives and got on with the job and nearly two years down the track we have four lures in production and some pretty amazing sales figures.

The Stiffy Fizzer

The first completed lure is the Stiffy fizzer which is a large heavy duty lure aimed at giant impoundment barra, black bass, cod, kingfish, and just about any other mean critter that takes a big fizzer.

The Stiffy Fizzer was recently judged Best New Lure at the Australian Fishing Tackle Association's annual conference on the Gold Coast.

A floating stick bait style lure, the Stiffy Fizzer was developed with big impoundment barramundi in mind, but don't be afraid to give it a swim wherever big fish are looking up, just waiting for their prey to come splashing across the water's surface.

The Stiffy Fizzer features a single metal bladed propeller on the front of the lure, and when it is worked with short, sharp rips of the rod tip, throughs up a heap of spray that tells predators that dinner's on the table.

The Stiffy Fizzer is 130 millimetres in length, and is available in four colours - Blue Fusilier (blue/silver), Bony Bream (black/silver), Green 'n Gold (green/gold), and Midnight Black (black). Hooks and rings are all super strong Owners, so you know that this lure is up to the big fish challenge.

The lure casts like a bullet, works well at high or low speed and takes the punishment of serious fish well with its razor sharp heavy duty owner hooks and rings.

The Bony Bream

Jason Wilhelm with his 124cm Bara and 30kgs! Caught on a Bushy Stiffy Boney Bream Lure. May 2007

This lure is fairly unusual as it is a floating bibbless minnow.

All you have to do to fish this lure well is to cast it out and wind it in at a steady speed.

The Bony bream is designed to fish only a couple of feet under the water and it is ideal for fishing around and over the shallow weedbeds in the major impoundments.

This lure wobbles like a wounded bony bream which is the natural tucker of the impoundment barra and it flashes brilliantly in the moonlight to attract fish from a long way off.

The lure casts a mile or you can troll it right in the shallows where the big fish hang out.

All stiffy lures are designed to take punishment and the bony bream has the heavy duty owner hooks and rings.

The Stiffy minnow

Bushy with a lazy little 1.99kg black. April 2007

The Stiffy minnow has just hit the market and already it has taken some great fish.

Designed to catch bream, trout, bass and flathead this little minnow really does the business - it casts a mile and has the erratic action from hell.

The lure has already been a winner on the bream tournament scene and has taken fish over the old fashioned four pound mark for Chris Wright, myself and for Steve Starling.

This lure took about eighteen months to develop and it really tested my patience but I think the effort was worth it.

The combination of a slim minnow profile, some great transparent colour schemes, great casting and erratic action all add up to something a bit special.

The number ten owner trebles mean you can pull like hell around the racks with plenty of confidence.

The Stiffy Popper

Number four in the Stiffy range is the Stiffy popper which is in production as we speak and should hit the shops in the next few weeks.

This lure is aimed at the bream and bass market but it was also designed with the latest craze of surface poppering for whiting firmly in mind. The proto types were extensively tested on whiting and they really do the business.

The stiffy popper is designed to cast further, to handle a wide variety of conditions from dead calm to large waves, and to hook a large percentage of strikes. Again the owner hooks and rings enable heavy pressure to be exerted on fish once they are hooked.

Well there you go - Stiffy Lures are alive and kicking - I might say that if I had known how time consuming, expensive, and tricky this project was going to be I just wouldn't have started, but now we have come this far it has been very rewarding.

I now have some idea of how to design a hard bodied lure and some of the new lures on the drawing board definitely have me excited.

Watch this space, and the walls of your tackle store, because more Stiffies are on the way and you know they will catch fish.