New Japanese techniques continue to spread to the U.S. with some regularity. Things have calmed quite a bit from the seminal years of the 1990s, when revolutions like drop shotting, performance jerkbaiting, fluorocarbon, weight-transfer systems and Senkos spread across the U.S. faster than the Spanish flu did in 1918. More recently we’ve been treated to slow-growth innovations like the Neko rig, the Inchi-wacky (Flick Shake) and spy baiting (or “spin baiting”).
Spy baiting has been on U.S. shores since at least 2010. That’s when anglers on Japan’s Lake Biwa began to pursue the commonsense notion that fish are mostly used to seeing bait swim naturally. And lure makers began to purposely design actions out of their baits to answer the demands of this new trend. Those baits reached California and gained a small following.
