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River2Sea
3701 Collins Ave #2
Richmond, CA 94806
510-237-2405
www.river2seausa.com

WideGlide

By Jimmy Fee

On a Friday night in late February a few years back, I was sitting on my couch getting my gear ready for an early morning cod trip. Winter had not yet released its icy grip on the Northeast, and cabin fever was running at an all-time high. As I packed, the Versus Network flickered on my TV. I remember looking up from my tying a teaser rig for cod and seeing Larry Dahlberg, host of The Hunt for Big Fish.

Most often when I catch an episode of this show, Dahlberg is in a far-off place catching big, exotic and, sometimes, downright ugly fish. On that episode, however, he was in his basement, sharing his recipe for a lure he called “The WideGlide.” Though I don’t remember the specifics of how the lure was made and carefully weighted, I remembered the action on it. When Larry Showed the lure in action, this spook-style bait swam an incredible distance to each side as it was retrieved, in the most exaggerated walk-the-dog action I had ever seen.

There were slow-motion shots of muskies and pike and peacock bass attacking the lure, but there was another species I knew just such a lure would be deadly on – the striped bass.

A couple years later, while walking the aisles at the International Convention of Allied Sportfishing Trades (ICAST) – the annual tradeshow where tackle manufacturers display their soon-to-be-released products for the sportfishing media – I came across a familiar-looking lure and a familiar face in the River2Sea booth. It was there that River2Sea unveiled the Larry Dahlberg series, a line of Dahlberg’s custom creations put into production and now available to the masses. Included in the line are the Clackin’ Craw, the Diver Frog, the Whopper Plopper and the WideGlide.

River2Sea lures were first available in Austrailia. The company’s trademark was innovative, realistic lures such as the Yabbie (Australian for crayfish). When River2Sea made the jump to the North American market, some of these products, like the Dragonfly Popper or the goldfish-imitating Gold’n Crank, earned the undeserved reputation as a “novelty” lure company
John Linckens of River2Sea met Larry Dahlberg at a friend’s fishing retail shop in the San Francisco Bay area in California. The shop was beginning to offer trips to South America for some of the hard-fighting and exotic species available south of the equator. Up to this point, Larry’s lure-making had been a basement operation, where he only made them for himself and maybe a few friends
“Larry really thinks like a fish,” John said. “He considers the smallest detail, and often that’s the difference between a big fish that follows and one that strikes. He puts a ton of thought into these lures, so before we could put them on the market, we had a lot of back and forth to get them just right.”

I met Larry at ICAST in 2010, and I had to agree with John’s assessment. Larry told me that he’d been holding onto the designs of the River2Sea Larry Dahlberg series for 20 years. River2Sea was a natural fit for Dahlberg’s custom creations with their commitment to creating realistic and innovative baits.

With a lure like the WideGlide, Larry said, regardless of the fish species, it appeals to the instincts that all predatory fish have. And if one thing can be said about the Northeast’s most popular predatory fish, striped bass, it’s that they are suckers for spook-style baits. I’ve seen large bass ignore pencil poppers and regular poppers, only to crush a topwater lure gliding from side to side.

“The WideGlide isn’t a spook-style bait,” John reminded me. “If you want a lure to just walk-the-dog with, you might as well buy a more traditional spook-style topwater.” The WideGlide, if worked correctly, can cover an 8-foot swath of water on the retrieve. And as it comes to a stop, it wobbles ever so slightly. This, Larry says, is what triggers the fish to t-bone the lure.

The WideGlide 200 is 7 7/8-inches long and is available in a surface and subsurface model that weigh 4 and 5 ounces, respectively. The subsurface model works side to side a few feet under the surface and is neutrally buoyant, coming to a complete pause under the surface.  The lure is available in six colors with Shadow (black), Cisco and Red Horse certain to be popular among the striper crowd. The lure itself is an exaggerated teardrop shape with most of the weight in the head, which allows it to wander so far side to side.  This is a big bait sure to get the attention of any big fish lurking in the area.

Getting the WideGlide to walk properly takes a different retrieve than a typical spook-style, walk-the-dog bait. Snapping the rod tip and creating slack in the line is the key to getting the WideGlide to slide the maximum distance to either side. If the line is tight following the rod motion, the lure’s motion will be restricted. This is important to keep in mind when rigging up. John advised against the use of a barrel swivel to attach the leader to the main line. On the pause following snapping the rod, the swivel will sink and “eat the slack” John says, which will inhibit the action. Attention also had to be paid when fishing the WideGlide in current. The lure should be cast up-current to allow for slack in the line.

“This lure catches fish in freshwater, saltwater, Amazon water, anywhere you fish it,” John told me. Though the WideGlide is a relative newcomer to the Northeast fishing scene, it’s already shown its wide appeal to our most popular gamefish. I’ve heard of stripers to 45 pounds falling to the lure so far. Bluefish, pike, muskies and even bluefin tuna have fallen for the WideGlide in On The Water’s area of coverage, and that’s not even counting the smaller WideGlide 120.

The WideGlide 120 is 4 ½ inches long with the surface model weighing 7/8 ounce and the subsurface weighing 1 1/8 ounces. This lure should be deadly on stripers focused on small bait, slong with largemouth and smallmouth bass.
The hardware on the WideGlide is tuna-tough with a strong through-wire harness. The lure comes equipped with sticky sharp 4X River2Sea hooks. The hard resin body has the color and scale patterns on the inside to prevent hook rash and other wear that destroys the color of plugs.

The internal scale pattern also offers some unique fish-attracting qualities. This interior scaling creates some incredible light reflection underwater, sending it in all directions. This small detail, John says, could be the difference between a big fish following the plug and turning away and a big fish eating the plug.