For a product that’s not scheduled to have its public unveiling for another 4 months, Phil Marks sure did a bang-up marketing job for the Strike King Series 10XD crankbait at the Sam Rayburn Reservoir FLW Tour Open last week.
While he caught just four of his weigh fish on the bait during the event, it accounted for four of his biggest bass, including an 8-pounder on Sunday when he lapped the field with a 32-12 stringer that gave him an 82-00 total and propelled him to a 16-plus pound victory over fellow Texan Keith Combs.
“I’d have loved to have caught all 20 on it because if I’d have caught 20 on it, I’d have weighed, I don’t know, a lot, because you don’t catch any little ones on it,” said Marks, who works for Strike King in product development and sales.
The genesis of the bait (shown to right above a Series 6XD) dates back to last year and, in an ironic twist, Combs was the first angler to be given a prototype to test in the field not long after signing on as a member of Strike King’s pro staff. He was also given strict orders to not show it to anyone or mention its existence, but to report back with how it fished and how deep it got, etc. Combs took it to Falcon Lake and caught an 8-pounder on his first cast.
“You can catch them on anything at Falcon, but he said it was incredible,” Marks said. “There were places he knew had fish but he couldn’t bit on with the 6XD. He’d throw the 10XD in there and they’d start crushing it and it’d fire up the school. He was real impressed with it.”
The bait is based off the frame of the 5XD and will dive to 25 feet on 15-pound fluorocarbon line.
“We wanted it to displace a lot of water and make a lot of noise,” Marks said. “It has a little wider wobble and it dives hard. For as big of a bait as it is, it doesn’t pull too terribly bad. There are other deep divers out there that don’t sell particularly well because they’re so hard to fish and you can’t pull them real fast. The key is to work those baits erratically and work them fast. I was burning that thing.”
Initially, Marks was inclined to keep talk of the bait under wraps this week, but once FLW cameras caught footage of him catching giant Rayburn bass with it, he got the blessing of Strike King president John Barns to laud its performance publicly. It’ll have its official public unveiling the Bassmaster Classic in February at Grand Lake.
“We had the final prototypes done last December and had the body and weighting and production tool done this past June,” Marks said. “We couldn’t have had it ready for ICAST this year because we hadn’t done the final testing on it.
“Really, we kept it quiet because we didn’t want it knocked off, quite frankly. We wanted to make sure we were first to market with it and we will be. What better time to launch it than having a Strike King employee win a major tournament with it?”
More details about Marks' pattern will be published soon.
