You know the old saying, “If it sounds to good to be true, it usually is!” What if we told you that there is a $4 crankbait out there that is an effective lure? No, it’s not used, it’s brand new in a package. You would probably roll your eyes as if we were crazy. Vicious Crankbaits retail for about 4 bucks, were recently introduced and we’ve been fishing them for several months now.
This line of baits are all just over 2” in length whether you get the shallow, medium or deep diver. The only differences between the models are the length of the bill, slight body style tweaks and the weight of the bait.
Color patterns are identical for all three versions. You can choose your favorite color and buy one for every depth.
The bodies vary slightly but are pretty standard crankbait silhouettes. The medium and deep diver share a belly hook hanger design that keeps the hooks from fouling with each other. The squarebill doesn’t have this feature as it isn’t needed.
The paint schemes are not ultra-realistic but do come in a nice variety that gives the angler options for dealing with water clarity from clear to stained.
A $4 bait … seriously?
When we first saw these and were told what the price point was going to be, our initial reaction was, “Are these a cheap or inexpensive bait?”
We separate the two by defining cheap as not well put together with inferior components, bad paint jobs, a lack of consistency in performance from one bait to the next, lousy hooks that bend out at the first sign of stress, etc.
Inexpensive on the other hand is not a negative in itself. It simply means that the retail price is less than the average for a given market while still delivering an adequate or better product.
Having defined our terms, we were anxious to find out which category this $4 crankbait was going to fit best in.
We started fishing the Vicious 2.2 or medium diver. This bait weighs only 1/4 ounce but is advertised to get down to 8 -12 feet. We don’t know how they arrived at this depth or the line size that is supposed to allow the bait to get there so we didn’t have equipment specs for guidance.
Fishing the Vicious Crankbait
We were using 8# mono when we first tied it on just to see how it would run. The first order of business was to play with the Vicious in shallow water just to see what we could find, positive or negative, prior to cutting loose at any specific target.
So nothing earth shattering came of that other than the Vicious proved to run true out of the box with a nice medium wobble and good deflection properties.
Some more messing around in the shallows, just to make sure this wasn’t a flash in the pan, showed that although we couldn’t hit the advertised depth, we got fairly close.
We were surprised by the feel of the bait on the retrieve. The medium diver provided good feedback to our hands no matter what it was doing whether that meant bouncing off some form of cover or swimming in open water.
The 1/4 ounce weight isn’t indicative of how it casts either. Distance was better than we anticipated for a plug this light.
So we started using it to root around some submerged stumps and limbs to see how the bill would hold up. We did not and have not managed to break it so that is a plus in our minds.
In the process of trying to damage the Vicious we got bites and landed each and every one without bending out the hooks or rolling the points. Impressive for a crankbait at this price point.
Then we put it up against a proven performer that we’ve caught a lot of fish on. Which was about double the price of the Vicious. While it couldn’t dethrone our reigning champion, it was game and made a contest of it.
The bottom line
What is the single most impressive feature of the Vicious Crankbait is, at the risk of being redundant, the price tag, $4.
For this you get what in our experience is a bait that is well sized especially for heavily pressured fish or for those that are in a neutral feeding mood as well as one that performs. All our test baits have run true, not needed tuning, held up well to our abuse and that of bass that bit them.
We know that one of the most difficult things to teach inexperienced anglers is to put your bait where the fish are. This often means casting your lure into some pretty nasty stuff, letting it bounce around off of all kinds of crud, just to get a bite.
It is much easier to get these folks to relax and concentrate on fishing when they know that they may lose a $4 bait as opposed to a one that may cost them $15 or more. This is the real value to anglers of the Vicious Crankbait.
You can load up on these without spending a great deal of money and learn to fish with them. They are inexpensive enough to use as a teaching tool for folks who are just getting into the sport and may be less than enthusiastic about losing a benjamin on a single cast.
No, the patterns are not ultra-fine, they don’t make use of exotic materials, the action is not something that is completely unique nor is the sound. But the Vicious Crankbaits are solid lures at an excellent price. So by our definition, they are not cheap at all, just very inexpensive.
| Vicious Crankbaits | |
|---|---|
| Overall rating |   |
| A capable, inexpensive crank | |
See ya’ on the water …
