We grew up fishing small rivers in Minnesota, we used the lures my great grandfather and grandfather used; silver spoons, nothing special. It worked great, but you ended up losing a ton of lures to snags.
We (my dad, brother and myself) started down the path of trying to find lures that would be less likely to snag, still easy to cast. This is in the mid eighties, so research generally consisted of whatever was in the local sporting goods store.
For quite a while we were using large white jig heads with the hooks buried in a rubber fake frog. This kept the snags at bay, but the rubber frogs were shredded by the pike’s teeth, so while we were catching fish, we still went through a ton of lures.
Then we found the spinnerbait, typical in bass boats in the south, these mimicked the action of a frog near the banks, or a wounded fish in the middle of the river, who knows?
We started building our own, trying different sizes, colors, and styles, but mostly used white medium sized spinnerbaits with double mister twister tails or the standard skirt style of a bass lure. It worked for us in the small rivers in MN, we sure thought we had it nailed at the time, not only pike, but walleye, smallmouth, catfish, goldeye, and sauger, all on bass lures.
That's a hog!
