Fish The Moment founder Matt Allen has officially introduced Core Tackle's Fin Swimbait to the public, taking the newly-released soft plastic to Lake Uchi for its first in-video outing and catching two of the better bass of his spring on it — including a rare 3 lb 7 oz smallmouth from the notoriously spotted-bass fishery.
Allen has been sitting on the bait for some time. "I waited 2 years to show you this new bait," he said in the title, framing the episode as both a product launch and a how-to. "I've been using it as a replacement for a crankbait or a spinner bait this spring. I'm catching a pile of quality fish on it."
The pitch on the bait itself is technical. "This is the first ever soft plastic bait that we launched for Core Tackle," Allen said, "and it is a really unique swimbait style bait that has a rocking side-to-side motion on a straight retrieve, which makes it great to work as kind of a cast-and-wind bait." The intended slot, he said, is the middle water-clarity band where crankbaits and spinner baits feel overdressed: "It is great when maybe it's a little bit too clean for a crankbait or a spinner bait, but maybe not so clean that the fish will actually still be up on the bank biting."
Allen's first fish of the day came on a windblown rock bank, a 3 lb 3 oz largemouth that shredded the Fin Swimbait on the hook-set. "That's a chunk right there. Solid three-pounder almost," he said, weighing the fish at 3 lb 3 oz before re-rigging. The follow-up was the episode's surprise: a smallmouth cast to what Allen described as a small, flatter main-lake point leading into a spawning pocket. "Oh my gosh, look at that smallie. That is a big smallie for out here on Uchi," he said. "I've heard they're out here. This is the first smallie I've ever actually caught out here on that Fin Swimbait. He absolutely cracked that bait." The smallmouth weighed 3 lb 7 oz — a rare-quality fish for the lake.
The pattern Allen settled into was straightforward: flatter banks leading into spawning pockets, with wind pushing bait onto the rock, fished on a half-ounce jig head so the Fin Swimbait could dig into the rock on the retrieve. "The way I have this head, it's a half-ounce head. So I'm deliberately digging this thing down the rocks, trying to make bottom contact as if you would kind of like a swing head, a croc bait, or even if you're throwing like a little heavier chatterbait," he said. The goal, he explained, is to generate the same reaction strikes those harder-working baits produce but with a subtler profile.
Because the Fin Swimbait's single-piece construction doesn't lend itself to laminate colour runs, Allen showed viewers how he hand-paints the bait with Spike-It pens: a blue line down the back, a chartreuse stripe down the side and, in his words, a "sexy shad pattern on a highlight red pearl base." The scented pens, he noted, don't interfere with the bait's garlic scent the way permanent markers do: "The baits I did with Sharpie are not performing nearly as well as the ones I'm doing with the Spike It. So that's kind of interesting."
The launch is tied to Core Tackle's Insider Program, which Allen used the video to clarify after an earlier miscue. "I think that people got thrown off by the word prototype," he said. "We're sending you what we believe are finished product, a bait that we would take to market and we plan to take to market." Insiders are receiving the Fin Swimbait and an unreleased Core Tackle jig head — also used in the video — in monthly drops via coretackle.com. The stated goal, Allen said, is real-world feedback on rigging variations and colours from a wider pool of anglers than he and business partner Matt can test alone.