The Story

The Story started with the search for my old favorite narrow neck popper, about 3 ¾” long and about ¾ to 1 ounce in weight.
It had to be made of wood to give that old vintage feel. Well, I couldn’t find one anymore, there were bigger wooden plugs but not the size and weight I was looking for. So I decided to make it. I made it the way I always thought it should be. With My Colors , not necessarily the top part of the plug, as I always thought that was to Catch the fishermen to buy it. But the belly of the lure, what the fish would see first. My lures have a Yellow halo running from the chin to mid belly with a blood red swish on top of that from chin to almost mid belly. There’s a whole school of thought about the color Yellow and fat content with predatory fish. My lures will always have that belly design no matter what the top and side color are. And many of my lures come with a yellow bucktail. Then I thought it would be better if it was thru wired for extra strength. I thought that may give it too much weight and a different action, but it did the opposite it was lighter and made no difference in the action. We also decided to design some different tail hooks as inline hooks are now the preferred hook for better release mortality. All our hooks are VMC hooks, the inline hook is VMC’s new Tinned (hence the color silver) 7266 #3/0 .
Again we have yellow bucktails in both treble and Inline. Plus we have designed a new muti color bucktail in treble and Inline which is White. Yellow and Red to match our signature belly.

With the extra-strong thru-wire construction, the Hog Island Lures Wooden Popper is a great addition to the plug bag for back bay when small forage is around and in light surf situations. With a perfect size imitating mullet & peanut bunker, this little popper has the guts like a standard surf plug that’s capable of bigger fish while providing a more finesse option for finicky fish situations.

After the introduction of the Little Popper we found other fishermen that were making their own lures, especially the Cape Cod Canal and surf fisherman. They would recreate what I call Lures of Legends. These were classic Northeast lures that really caught fish. Mostly Pencil Poppers, Needlefish, Bottle Poppers and Darters of all sizes and weights.

We try to talk to as many fishermen as we can to see if what they are making by hand makes any sense to reproduce in a production environment. And with their permission we try to make those Lures of Legends for local tackle shops in their fishing communities. We are still a small and new company ourselves, trying to navigate in the fishing lure industry.

We don’t want to compete with the tackle shops that sell our products, so we list the shops where we are located.
We will start to sell from our website in the future those items that the tackle shops don’t wish to handle.
Thank you for spending the time to read our story. As we develop our website, we hope it to be more interactive and would like to see and pictures that you caught with our lures.

Thankyou
Steve Ricci