Do you have anything that sits around on your desk or somewhere that you just pick up and fiddle with every now and then? For me, it's an unpainted wooden crankbait body sent to me by Dieter Stanford of Stanford Cedar Lures.
I've always had an affinity for sporting objects made of wood. Whenever someone shows me a shotgun or rifle I haven't seen before, the first thing I check out is the stock (and if that piece is synthetic, my interest in the gun wanes dramatically). As a kid, I insisted on using wooden baseball bats until I was about 14 and finally conceded the fact that the ball jumped off of aluminum versions at a considerably higher velocity. I'd throw in my affection for bamboo fishing rods, too, but bamboo is actually a grass.
Unlike my brothers, I have no talent for working with wood. The younger one is a high school woodshop teacher who can seemingly build a quality doghouse in less time than it takes me to write one of these commentaries. The older one creates art with a chainsaw, including some fine largemouth bass depictions (although he always seems to make the tails just a little too big).
Likewise, the lacquered square-bill body that Mr. Stanford sent me (along with some finished samples of his wares) is imperfect. When I run my finger down either side, I feel several small dents and pockmarks. That's as it should be, though, and how it must be. After all, it's an object that a man produced with his hands from something that grew out of the ground, not a molded former liquid that rolled off an assembly line.
"All Stanford Lures are meticulously hand-tuned in a 40-foot pool by me," he wrote in the accompanying note. "Each bait must pass rigorous testing and inspection before it is deemed good enough to be sold as a Stanford Lure. This is why we can guarantee that each lure will satisfy the angler and run true out of the box."
I'll testify that they work, although I'll skip the details of how I know that. You've all heard enough fish stories to last you a lifetime.
––John Johnson
––BassFan Senior Editor
Snapcasts are brief opinion pieces produced by BassFan staff members. The views presented are the author's alone.
