Swimbait Review: Rafa Crappie
Swimbait Review: Rafa Crappie
This past year, Universe has done some sweet colabs with different makers, and I've been lucky enough to snag a few of em. The Rafa Crappie by Rafael Perez came out this summer, and I was able to shoot a video. Kind of forgot i had it, but 3 different guys asked me about this particular bait this week and it dashed my memory. Anyways, here she is!
The Rafa Crappie is a 2 PC jointed resin glide, coming in at 7" and 3 oz. The bait features a soft rubber tail, along with rotating hook hangers. Nice! You will also notice that the bait is an xss, and when i shot this vid our water was about 80 degrees. I would anticipate that it may float in colder water unless weight is added.
On the straight swim, the bait has a pretty wide swim to it, with the head cutting hard back and forth (you can feel the head thumps in the rod pretty easily). If you reel as soon as it touches down, you can swim it almost like a wake bait, and leave a nice ripple trail behind. The bait stays super upright and has great stability, as shown by the dead burn. At any speed, there is no lift or nose up, which is a plus in my book.
Gliding can be achieved with various reel inputs, from soft to hard. Soft short hits create a medium length glide, with great stability and a pause on the ends. The transitions are pretty tight, due to both the baits profile and joint configuration. It certainly will get wider than just the 180 turn, it does have some glide. You can emphasize this glide by using longer smoother reel bumps, kind of like 3/4 turns. Once you get the feel of it (hitting it hard enough to glide but soft enough to not turn it) then you can get a solid foot or more of glide out of the bait. Using a stretchy line will also make this easier.
Increase the strength of the reel bumps into more of chops to get a hard 180 degree turn, with that abrupt turning action. This can also be done with short rod tip twitches as well.
I prefer to fish the Rafa Crappie pretty cast and high in the water column, and I felt as if the bait shined in this manner. Burn and pause mixed with some reel chops or rod twitches will get the bait dancing, while also throwing some nice flash and causing a commotion. Use your imagination here, a nice stable bait will accept lots of different rod or reel inputs.
I threw the Rafa Crappie on a Dobyns 806 paired with a Tranx 300 and 20 lb big game mono. Fluro or copoly would be just fine as well, but I would probably not reccomend braid for this bait. It will certainly work, but I think it may overpower the bait slightly. With the bait only being 3 oz, you could get away with something like the 795 also, but the 806 felt better to me in terms of power and action.
Shout out to Wayne Campbell for setting up some sweet colabs such as this one. Hope that you enjoyed this review! See you next Sunday.