Ask any fisherman anywhere in the world and they will tell you that live bait is best. To predatory fish, it looks right, it smells right, it moves right, and heck it even tastes right. Nothing beats the real thing. But it’s also a huge pain. You’re out there to catch The Big One, and you spend the morning searching for bait schools, untangling sabikis, and burning daylight. And for all the cost and space on your boat your livewell eats up, you usually end up without a single kicking fish before the day is done. Not to mention, if you’re fishing from shore, live bait fish are pretty much not an option.
A young startup company out of Medford is developing a unique solution to this problem called Zombait. It is a battery operated, waterproof device which can inserted through the mouth of a dead bait fish to make it swim again! The idea originated with Rink Varian, a commercial fisherman out of Phippsburg Maine who’s been catching bluefin tuna for over 35 years. Varian teamed up with two engineers out of Boston, Matthew Borowski and Jessy Cusack, to try and bring his idea to life. “I’d been looking for something like this on the market for years, and we finally decided to try and make it ourselves.” The aim of the product is to be as effective as live bait, but as easy as dead bait.
Use Zombait with your favorite bait species (mackerel, herring, whiting, etc), rig it like you normally would, pop in the Zombait device, and its automatic water activation will make your once-dead fish start kicking like new as soon as it hits the water. It is designed to be rugged, retrievable, and reusable, with replaceable batteries that provide hours of energetic motion. Check out Zombait.com for some pretty amazing videos of it in action.
The team has spent nearly two years refining and improving the product, talking to hundreds of fisherman at local events, and field testing the product with fisherman all along the East Coast. They are now ready to “take the product out of the basement and onto store shelves.” To do so, they are launching a campaign on the crowdfunding site Kickstarter beginning November 23 and running through the end of the year. The product is available for preorder through the campaign, and the funds will be used to build a first production run of Zombait. We encourage you to check out and support their campaign, not to mention be one of the first fishermen to use this exciting new product!
Visit their kickstarter to pre-order Zombait at www.zombait.com or their website at www.zombaitlures.com.
