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Superior Customer Service In Muskie Tackle

Category: article

 Feb 25th, 2014 by OutdoorsFIRST 

Modified Feb 25th, 2014 at 12:00 AM

It was league night on Pewaukee Lake as James Formolo and I traced the break. I had been throwing a custom 8oz Mag SuperD, one of several I had ordered from Tackle Industries back in May, and my confidence was through the roof. Every lure has a unique personality when it comes to how they ride in the water and this specific SuperD’s action I was particularly fond of.

I had caught a measurable upper-30’s fish earlier that evening and was looking for a second. We were throwing up over the deep weeds with the soft plastic baits and ripping them through, leaving a trail of milfoil floating in their wake. The first fish shot out from the depths and t-boned the bait just before me and the fight was on.

The battle was intense on short line, but I opened up the spool and gave her some room before guiding her into the net. After a quick measurement and a photo for evidence of the catch we let her swim.

When a muskie fisherman starts logging obsessive hours on the drink, there really is no predicting what lessons can be learned the hard way and this evening was no exception.

My very next cast I let that SuperD fly, catapulting a long bomb perhaps from the adrenaline of the recent catch. I remember thinking, “Boy that bait really got some wings under it…” as I watched it sail beyond the reach of any catapult cast I could remember producing.

I suppose if I were newer to the drill I may have been more shocked when I found that my leader snap had broken at the bend from the apparent wear of changing lures a few too many times and absorbing the pressure of infinite pulls, sweeps and jerks of the SuperD. I learned a lesson that day the hard way. I shook my head a couple of times and tied on a new snap to the fluorocarbon leader, clipped on another custom SuperD and let her fly.

That evening I ended up netting a healthy 41-inch fish for James, and with limited time remaining, James ended up scooping my second measurable fish of the night. That second 35-inch fish ended up giving me the inches I needed to secure the win over my friendly competition that night, which we celebrated with a round of beverages and shared stories from the evening on the water.

I emailed James Haworth, the owner of Tackle Industries, the very next day and shared the pictures of the two fish captured that night and briefly mentioned the loss of my favorite SuperD. James replied promptly that very day and asked for the color of the bait that I had cast off, along with a quick note thanking me for the pictures and expressed sympathy for any muskie stick that loses a lure they’re fond of.

A couple of days later I returned home to find a package stuffed in my mailbox with the senders address beneath a Tackle Industries logo. I hurried in to open the package only to find a replacement to the lure I had lost just a few days earlier, no strings attached.

These days there are more muskie lure manufacturers than ever before. The boom of big twin bladed bucktails and soft plastics has grown tremendously over the last decade and so have the varieties of manufacturers that now produce their own variations of these sensational lure types. With so many options to choose from, I was sure glad I chose Tackle Industries to purchase that mid-May order of soft plastics swimbaits. James’ superior attention to customer service is in a class all of its own. I didn’t ask James to replace what I had lost and that certainly wasn’t the intent of my email after that night on the water.

Through the years I have limited my go-to baits to specific “types”, but I’ve never really been brand-specific. I throw them all, so long as the “type” fits into the right category and effectively gets the job done. When I’m ready to pull out my wallet and spend my hard-earned cash, however, I think about the customer service of the lure manufacturers I have dealt with that have hard-earned my respect, thus my business. It is true that a small business that revolves around their customers will in turn have customers who revolve around their business.