Worth Their Weight

Keith Thomas creates glide baits that'll catch the biggest fish in your home waters, if you can get your hands on one.

By Joe Cermele

August 19, 2024

A well-tuned glide bait flirts with fish like a siren, daring them to strike. You can’t take your eyes off the sway and shimmy — so subtle, delicate, lifelike and tantalizing — nor should you. I broke my gaze when a sharp pop rang out to my left. By the time I shifted my eyes, the fish was gone. All that remained was a soft, dissipating swirl and Keith Thomas’ glide bait hovering perfectly still just below the surface.

The 10-inch lure mimicked an adult gizzard shad, all white save for its large, red eyes and sparse blood spatter effect across its back. Thomas dropped his shoulders and cocked his chin to the sky. “That was a good one,” he bellowed through clenched teeth. “Dammit! That bass was at least 7 pounds.” Thomas may have been upset, but I was astonished. The prespawn female didn’t so much as graze the bait with the skin of her lip, but the miss proved the potency of a glide bait.

Lake Nockamixon in eastern Pennsylvania is right in Thomas’ backyard. It is heavily pressured and notoriously fickle — a hero-or-zero fishery, and today everyone seemed to be a zero. Muskie trollers within eyeshot never reached for a net. Crappie anglers moved constantly, searching for a willing school. A few bass guys who know Thomas by his reputation for roping hogs motored over throughout the morning, lamenting that the lack of wind, bluebird sky, high barometric pressure, even suggesting that perhaps yesterday’s solar eclipse had the fish locked up so tight the door was welded shut.

Thomas knew conditions were awful before we left the ramp, yet his glide bait made a trophy-caliber bass that should have been pinned down make a move. Presenting a target so irresistible regardless of hunger or mood is the power of a good glide bait, and Thomas’s Black Talon lures are some of the best.

You won’t find a Black Talon website or Black Talon Instagram page. Thomas doesn’t need to advertise, and being uninterested in mass-producing his baits, he knows he could never make enough to keep an online store stocked. Your only shot at getting one is being accepted into the Black Talon private Facebook group and monitoring it diligently for a bait drop. There is no warning, no heads-up. Thomas might have two lures or a dozen ready for sale. When he posts, the folks who comment first win the right to purchase, and whether he’s dropping $160 baits with less flashy paint jobs or one of his signature foil-inlaid lures that fetch north of $300, they are claimed in seconds.

“People try to type too much,” he says. “All I say is the first few people to comment get to buy a bait, but if you’re trying to type a sentence or more than just ‘in,’ you’re already too late. I’ve had guys beg me for mercy because they’ve been unsuccessful for years.” Meanwhile, if you’re a lucky angler in the right place at the right time, you can nab a Black Talon for free.

At 6 feet, 6 inches, and with broad shoulders, massive hands and arms like granite, Thomas looks like he could be a bouncer at the rowdiest roadhouse in Dallas, but the 55-year-old former wildland firefighter’s physique belies his warmth and kindness. As we lobbed cast after cast at the shoreline, he told me about helping a kid on the beach catch his biggest striper ever with his Donk glide bait, which he insisted the young man take home, even telling his dad that if he loses it, reach out and he’ll send another. Not long ago, he gifted a bait to a kid on the bank at Nockamixon, and after a brief tutorial on how to swim it, the lad landed the biggest largemouth of his life, a 7-pounder cozied up next to a fallen tree.

Thomas certainly isn’t the only custom glide-bait maker in the game, but his work is some of the most sought-after. Though he’s been making lures for personal use and as giveaways for charities for decades, Black Talon Custom Lures officially went public in 2014 with wooden surface swimmers and pencil poppers coveted by striper surf anglers throughout the Northeast. Behind the scenes, though, Thomas had been making glide baits out of wood and using them to crush giant bass throughout the region. When he posted a few of his early gliders on Facebook, devotees went nuts. With demand increasing, Thomas switched to resin in 2020 to speed up the production process. Between his own fishing success, the success of buddies, a few bass tournament wins, word of mouth and eventual airtime with big shooters like pro angler Mike Iaconelli, Thomas became royalty in the world of custom glide baits.

The “AFL” in his AFL glide bait stands for “Aaron F’ing Lewis,” the lead singer of the band Staind and one of Thomas’ best clients and fishing buddies. Lewis suggested some design tweaks to a previous version of the lure that stuck. Like most lure makers, Thomas wants his baits to be fished, but the byproduct of the glide bait boom is a collector’s market where lures are shelved or flipped online for profit like baseball cards.

“I hear so many guys say, ‘I wanna get into custom gliders,’ ” Thomas says. “I say, ‘OK, you got a hundred-dollar bill on you?’ They say, ‘yeah.’ I say, ‘would you feel bad if you burned it?’ When they say yes, I tell them they ain’t ready for glide baits.”

Naturally, the prices Thomas and other small-batch makers fetch for their work is shocking, but once you understand how these lures work and how they’re made, the cost is justified. You’ll pay an upcharge for builders with a reputation like Thomas, but this isn’t a case of paying for an artist’s signature. You’re ponying up because their art functions consistently.

Savage Gear, SPRO, 6th Sense and Molix are a few of the companies that mass-produce large glide baits for less than $100 and as little as $25. To be fair, they can all fool big fish, but what many glide-bait enthusiasts argue is that they typically cannot be finessed as intimately as custom gliders, largely because it’s not easy to achieve perfect balance with machines geared for volume. According to Thomas, mass production also allows for variances — in other words, it’s acceptable to manufacturers if a percentage of their “slow sinkers” drop like stones. Thomas will not sell a bait until he’s tested it to make sure it does exactly what it should.

A true slow sinker should descend painfully slow. So slow that just by keeping the rod tip up and a bit of tension on the line, you can make it hover in place below the surface. To achieve this, Thomas uses meticulous formulas developed through trial and error. Resin, he explains, will sink fast, so he mixes in a precise ratio of micro balloons — powderlike, near-microscopic, hollow glass beads — to achieve the desired sink rate. The hard part, he says, is nailing the right amount of buoyancy while making sure the bait keels, meaning it remains perfectly horizontal in the water. The slightest miscalculation can throw off the balance.

The magic of a glide bait is its ability to hang limp in the zone, then spring to life with sudden but gentle movements that make the most discerning fish believe they’re looking at a big meal that’s too easy to pass up. You’d swear you’re looking at a live fish that’s wounded or disoriented or doesn’t have its guard up like it should. The joints and hand-cut synthetic hair tails bring these baits to life. If they don’t pivot and dance with the slightest turn of the reel handle, into the reject pile they go.

“The pause is everything,” Thomas says. “If you’re a big, smart bass, you know how to calculate. Those fish aren’t going to chase their food all over the place. They’re going to make a move when they know that effort is going to result in a meal.”

What many anglers don’t grasp is that while the meal a glide bait presents is supersized, the lures are not trophy-fish-or-bust baits. The modus operandi of most glider freaks is, in fact, to catch the biggest fish possible, but the truth is, these lures create the illusion of a target so easy that it emboldens even average fish to take a swipe. And a swipe is all you need. Any glide-baiter will tell you the hit is not always a slam. Ten-plus-pound largemouths, 40-plus-inch muskies, and 30-plus-pound stripers will sometimes barely tap these lures, as if giving them a taste or a little check. But if you’re focused and ready to strike, you can get a hook in even if all the fish does is kiss the belly. The most fun part is that, quite often, you know the hit is coming.

“I don’t look at the glider; I look behind it and below it because those giant bass will track it a long way,” Thomas says as we work around a field of submerged stumps. “And they don’t recognize your boat as a boat. They see it as an obstacle that will make the bait change direction, which is why a lot of the biggest fish eat very close. Never take the bait out of the water too early.”

If fooling high-caliber fish on pressured water is the primary reason glide baits have become wildly trendy, the visual attacks are a close second. It’s hard to fish one without your heart rate ticking up. “I don’t care which glide bait you use,” Thomas says. “If you see an 8-pound bass come up on it and you’re a true fisherman, you’re done. You’re addicted.”

Thomas, however, has been addicted far longer than most, and he’ll be the first to tell you that while he may be in the limelight now, he’s no glide-bait pioneer. The lure most fishing history buffs credit as the first glide bait is the K&K Animated Minnow created by John D. Kreisser in 1906. With a wide profile, hinged joint and rigid tail that aided balance and steering, the K&K was advertised as the “minnow that swims.” Though it sold well at the time, its run was relatively short. Little did Kreisser know that his design would resurface dec-ades later, essentially by accident, and lead to a glide-bait boom.

The chronological history of glide baits is hazy, but many point to Japan in the early 2000s as a flash point, when anglers began removing the lips from large, diving, jointed swimbaits and tinkering with weight to make them “glide.” Their success prompted Japanese lure makers such as Deps and RomanMade to produce baits that fetched high prices stateside, as California anglers looked for an edge for monster bass on such trout-laden lakes as Casitas and Castaic. As the mass-produced Creek Chub Pikie Minnow became the muse for countless custom surf-lure makers that would emerge with their own twists on metal-lipped swimming plugs, the early influx of hard-to-get Japanese baits become the spark for the evolution of the custom-glide-bait scene.

“I was throwing giant baits for bass on Nockamixon when I still had long hair and Ronald Reagan was president,” Thomas says with a chuckle. “Guys used to laugh at me at the boat ramp. I’d make these big, wood baits, and they looked terrible. I didn’t know how to seal the wood properly or anything, but they caught a ton of big fish. Back then, though, I was extremely tight-lipped about how well they worked.”

Being tight-lipped, of course, no longer works in the social media-driven world. You can’t earn a reputation without your baits producing and being seen, and the more they produce, the more people want to throw them.

Glide baits aren’t completely intuitive. It takes practice to finesse, and even more training to resist the urge to swing early when a big fish ghosts up. I learned this the hard way when a 4-pound bass showed itself after hours of nothing and I whiffed. Regardless, that was my second bass willing to at least try on an otherwise lockjaw day.

Fishing with Thomas was an eye-opening experience, because he operates on a different plane than most anglers. Once you dabble in his world, it’s hard to go back to jigs, crankbaits and flukes. He is looking for “the one” every single time he’s on the water. If a bass doesn’t break the 8-pound mark, he’s not overly excited about it. That may sound like bravado, but Thomas can back it up. His biggest bass weighed 11.1 pounds, and he has more 9-pounders close to home than most bass pros will ever see fishing across the country.

He’s also inspired new bait builders to pursue the craft, and despite being flattered, he gives them all the same advice. “I tell them don’t be inspired by anybody,” he says. “If we all read a book on how to make a lure, we’d all make the same lure. Don’t worry about how anybody else builds a bait or does their paint. Let the fish you’re targeting tell you how that bait should perform.”

It’s been said that, like many things in fishing, glide baits are a fad, and we’re on the back side of the trend. Thomas disagrees. “I don’t think this has even peaked,” he says. “These lures can catch you your personal best, or the oldest, wisest fish in your home water. As long as anglers are still chasing those goals, glide baits will never go away.”