ON STURGEON LAKE, Minn. _ Ron Riegger opened a clear plastic tackle tray, pulled out one of dozens of soft plastic lures from inside and handed it to me. Suddenly, my enthusiasm for a morning of fishing sank just a bit.
Riegger suggested I try one of his home-made lures. It was mostly deep red, with a little white plastic where the color didn't inject quite right, about 3 inches long.
It had rings around it _ Riegger calls it a ringworm _ but with an unusual straight tail. No twister tail, no paddle tail, just a nub.
Uffda, I thought to myself, what the heck was this?
What it was was a fish catching machine. Over the next four hours, Riegger and I used red plastic ringworms he made in his shop in Moose Lake to catch dozens of largemouth bass, small northern pike (to the point of annoyance, we couldn't keep them off our lures) some nice crappies and even two keeper-sized walleyes. All fish were released.
The worm was threaded onto a unique leadhead jig which Riegger also poured in his shop and then powder-coat painted with a bright chrome finish. (Tip: Riegger's factories made tens of thousands of painted jig heads in dozens of colors for big name take companies, but his favorite color is chrome.)
On a sunny but breezy May morning we had pretty steady action from 8 a.m. to noon, fishing weed beds in this sandy-bottom, clear-water, milfoil-infested lake in northern Pine County. All with tackle designed and made by Riegger.
Apparently he can also read minds.
"I'll bet when you first saw that worm you didn't think too much of it, did you?" Riegger said between casts after about three hours of catching fish. "It doesn't look like anything in nature. It doesn't look like much ... But, for whatever reason, it's been a fish-catching devil for me."
That's pretty much Riegger's story. The fishing tackle he designs in his head and transfers to reality tend to work well. And sell well.
"I tell people I'm in the cosmetics business. If it doesn't look good it won't sell," he noted. And if it doesn't sell, it doesn't matter how good the lure is at catching fish.
It's not so much that Riegger develops revolutionary new tackle. But he has a knack of taking tackle that already works and making it better, or tackle that's close to good and making it great.
Riegger loves solving problems, whether it's how to make lure colors brighter and more durable or figuring out where largemouth bass are hanging out in the lake.
"I've had people bring me a napkin from Perkins and showed me a design they sketched and asked me to make it for them," Riegger said. And he did.
Riegger loves to get into a school of keeper crappies for fish fry fodder and has a soft spot for big bass for fun. On our morning of fishing he was focusing on a pronounced weedline, specifically the inside weed line toward shore.
"By far, on this lake, there's more fish on the inside, the shallow side, than the outside," Riegger said as he tossed back yet another bass.
As we moved between spots Riegger explained how he's now working on a better design for a weedless jighead (made for soft plastic worms) for a major tackle company that he can't name.
"I'm not an inventor, really, I'm more of a make it better-er," he said as he jumped from behind the wheel of his Stratos bass boat to take his usual fishing position on the casting deck up front. "But I'm definitely an entrepreneur."
