08/28/2024
Hi Friends, Pro-Staff, and fellow anglers,
It is with some sadness and regret that I make this announcement.
After almost 30 years of design, testing, developing and years of stellar sales, I am discontinuing my Popular line of LONG-BOW WALLEYE Spinners.
This is due to the retirement of my lead-master “Thomas Junge”, due to health issues.
The Long-Bow spinner was formed from a dream I had for a spinner that could be fished at great depth vertically on both retrieve and fall, without tangle or line foul.
My first designs of the Long-Bow were focused on Summer Lake Trout, in water depth of around 60’.
To get a spinner to work on the fall, I started with an age-old weight-forward design, this needed something to hold the line away from the spinning blade or it would foul on a vertical fall.
I needed a device that would hold the line away from the spinning blade on the fall, but would not hinder the lures action when retrieved or trolled. To accomplish this, I devised a drawbar, a short length of stiff wire that went from the line and the lure head, and I used a head with a deep counter sink, that would hold the drawbar to the side when the lure was sinking, but would immediately straighten out when the lure was retrieved or trolled.
My first prototype of the Long-Bow worked ok, caught walleyes, and proved to be dynamite on Bass, but when trolled or cast for long periods, I often experienced line twist.
I worked for another 8 years on the Long-Bow design , length of drawbar, weight, style of hook, length of body-wire, etc. until I felt that the Long-Bow design would perform and produce good enough to sell.
The first years sales were great, all reports and e-mails were more than positive, and for the next several years the Long-Bow spinner was a good producer and a good seller. It was good, but the small amount of line twist was an imperfection that bothered me.
One year, while doing a Sports & Vacation Show, in Rochester Mn. , a man about my age, was hanging around my booth, watching me make sales and talking to customers, and after a while, when the crowd thinned, the man approached me and asked if he could help in any way, or if I would want to sell his home-made jigs. He told me his name was Tom Junge, that he was a retired Fireman, and he wanted something work on during his retirement. I told Tom that I only sold my own products and that the only thing I had that was made of lead was my Long-Bow heads. Tom looked at the Long-Bow heads and asked if I would be willing to let him make them. I thought about this, and then showed Tom why I was not happy with my present Long-Bow heads and that I wanted to design a keel on them so the lure would not twist the line when retrieved, and if he could do that, he had a job.
Tom went right to work; he spent hours using a Dremel tool, as well as other hand tools, reforming a store-bought mold into a mold that produced a Long-Bow head with a keel. Together Tom and I tweaked and picked away at our new design (I would come up with a “what if”, Tom would say “I can do that” and make the changes) until, after a week or so the new Long-Bow heads were ready for production and sales.
The new style of Long-Bow worked pretty well and was a real Walleye producer, and because of the vertical fishing qualities, folks were finding that the Long-Bow worked well for early Ice Fishing as well, and though I was mostly happy with the new design, some of my Pro-Staff was reporting that they were still experiencing some Line-twist at fast retrieve and fast troll, also when fishing the big rivers like the Mississippi and Missouri, the spinners weren’t heavy enough. It was back to the drawing board for Tom and I. We decided to step up to a larger body size, and I thought of putting a ball shaped feature on the very tip of the keel for better balance. These were the final changes we made to the Long-Bow design, and to this day, the Long-Bow walleye Spinner has been my best selling lure at every Sports Show I have attended.
And so, with Tom’s retirement from the bench, and without his great craftsmanship, I will be discontinuing the Long-Bow spinner, probably the most perfected spinner I have ever made, Vertical bottom-bouncing, casting, trolling, glowing in the dark, baited or unbaited, the Long-Bow spinner is the SUV of Spinners, and every part 100% made in the USA.
Thank You Tom Junge for all you have done in making my dream of the Long-Bow Spinner a reality!
At the time of this writing, there are still around 500 Long-Bow spinners still on the shelf, and unless I find another Lead-Master, I expect these to be sold out by February.
Remaining Long-Bow spinners can be purchased at eggersspinners.com .
John Eggers(spindoctor)
