Building a better bass lure in Cutchogue

The East End has long been a proving ground for marine innovations. I guess that would make it a proving water.

One of the most notable was the USS Holland, the Navy’s first commissioned submarine, which was tested and refined in New Suffolk in the 1890s.

More recently, Chris Pickerell of Cornell Cooperative Extension’s Southold Marine Center developed “seed buoys” to promote the return of eelgrass (and thus scallops) to the bays. And not just our bays. The innovative mesh bags have been used all over the place, from the Chesapeake to San Francisco.

Now another creation is surfacing, often bringing a striped bass with it. It’s called the Bottle Darter.

“I’ve been making lures all my life,” said Larry Welcome of Cutchogue. He was 10 and living in Long Beach when he created his first by snipping a tuft of hair from his sleeping sister’s head. “[Almost] 50 years later she hasn’t forgiven me yet,” he said. On the other hand, the lure worked “worked great.”

Welcome is 58 now, retired in 2005 after 27 years as a tech specialist for Brookhaven National Lab, helping build its superconducting accelerator. When not at work through all those years, he was usually fishing.

And designing lures. The best yet is the Bottle Darter. So good that he spent six months and $5,000 patenting it, and three years and $50,000 developing it as a commercial product.

He needed a hand to make that happen. Though he built about 5,000 of the lures in his shop out of wood over the last 15 years, it took an engineer to help him make the commercial leap. As it happened, he knew one.

After church one Sunday about 15 years ago, Welcome was talking to somebody about, you guessed it, fishing, and a young man intruded. “I heard the word and I perked right up,” said Rob Koch, now 29, of Mattituck. The two would go on to become the best of fishing buddies. Along the way, as luck and fate would have it, Koch decided to become an engineer, graduating in 2002 from Worcester Polytechnic Institute.

Three years ago, after catching “tons and tons of fish” with Welcome’s homemade Bottle Darters, the duo decided to take the lure to market. They formed Northbar Tackle LLC, named for the famed fishing reef off Montauk, and went to work on computer modeling, eventually leading to an injection-molded plastic product.

Three weeks ago they took the prototypes to an undisclosed Sound shore location for field tests. Fifty casts with the yellow model and nothing, so Koch switched to black and purple and something very big happened. “The first cast a fish came up and just inhaled it,” he said.

Welcome, who was fishing a bit downdrift, saw the striped bass swim by. “It looked like a submarine going past me,” he said. “I never saw a fish that big landed in the surf.”

It turned out to be a 63-pounder, a personal record for Koch and a roaring debut for the new Bottle Darter.

(What’s different about it? It combines the shape and action of two great lures, Welcome said: the Montauk Darter and the Bottle Swimmer. So instead of one lure that zig-zags and another that wiggles, you one that zigs, zags and wiggles. “It really works,” said the inventor.)

“Three years of prototyping and we finally got it right,” Koch said. They took a photo of the fish, “did a high-five and said, let’s go.” Since then, 2,500 have been turned out by their manufacturer and are now in tackle shops all over the Northeast for about $18.

What struck me about this story is the blend of belief, stubbornness and good fortune that attends the birth of so many innovations.

“When I started getting into this, I was meeting guys in tackle shops and every one of them said I wouldn’t last three years,” Welcome recalled. “It was so discouraging.” But it was also “one of things just makes you dig in and say, yeah, we’ll see.”

He conceded, however, that “99 percent of the time, guys who start building lures bail out. It’s too difficult, there’s not enough money,” etc.

Welcome and Koch appear to be among the one percenters.

TOP PHOTO: Rob Koch with the 63-pound striped bass caught on the Bottle Darter prototype.

INSET: A Bottle Darter.


Jeff Miller / Long Island Business News / June 25, 2009