Berkley Havoc Lane’s Fatty Craw Review

Well gang, here it is spring with the weather changing day to day and we have a bunch of new baits to look at. Let’s start with one of the new Berkley Havoc lures that were introduced at this year’s classic, the Lane’s Fatty Craw.

This new bait is a four inch craw imitation that comes in several colors that features a kind of flat body with a couple of big claw like appendages. When this was initially introduced, I had my questions as to why Berkley would produce a bait that competes directly with their own, very popular chigger-craw.

Not only do both of these soft plastics share the same scent and similar color palettes, the angler is going to use them interchangeably in the same conditions. The kicker being the Havoc series is about half the price, $2.99, of the chigger-craw at around $4.59.

Action And Rigging

The action of the Fatty Craw is interesting in that it behaves like a hybrid between a creature bait and a craw bait. Due to its relatively fat and flat profile, it glides much like a creature but the claw appendages, which swim very much like the claws on Strike King’s Rage Tail Craw, add an extra flapping action to the lure as it swims. So what does this mean to us anglers?

I rigged this up on a 5/0 Mustad Power Lock Plus hook. The lake we were fishing has already seen some lily-pad growth and I was looking to use this bait in the lilies for some pre-spawn fish. The day we went fishing was blue-bird skies and got up to about 87 degrees. I figured this would be the ideal bait to swim through the stems and trigger some fish. I gotta’ tell you, I was impressed with the Fatty Craw.

It casts well and appears very natural in the water. I tried several retrieves to see how the bait would perform. At first, I was yo-yoing it close to the bottom and sure enough, got hit there. Then, I tried dragging it through some stems with short pauses and again, picked up a couple of fish doing that. So I switched to bottom bouncing the lure to see if this would be effective and guess what, it was!

Run And Gun Through Structure

I ran the Havoc Fatty Craw through every piece of structure I could find and had no issues with it tearing or coming off of the hook. However, on one particularly vicious strike that came as I was swimming the bait through some sparse stick-ups, when I landed the fish, I noticed that my Fatty Craw came back to me sans the claws. Oh well, at 3 bucks a pack, I just grabbed another, rigged it up and threw it back out.

I really enjoyed fishing the Havoc bait for the time I was using it. I even ran across one active bed and dropped my fatty craw in it. That fish didn’t even hesitate before blasting the bait! He was in a bad mood and took it out on my craw! I landed him without incident and promptly returned him to the water without taking the time to get a picture.

In the final analysis, I am still somewhat perplexed as to why Berkley introduced this bait at this price point. The Fatty Craw is an effective lure, possibly more so than the Chigger Craw and will more than likely steal some loyal users away from the Chigger Craw. But I’m not gonna’ complain. For spring time bassin’ when the mud-bugs start to emerge, or anytime you need to slow down and fish the bottom with a craw imitation, the Berkley Havoc Lane’s Fatty Craw is a bait that deserves a place in your tackle box.

See ya’ on the water …