From Tinkering to Trade for Speonk Fisherman

For South Fork resident Dave Sanatore, the early months of the 2020 pandemic and the downtime so many office workers found themselves with was a rare opportunity to take a formerly casual passion to the next level of dedication — or obsession.

What had been a lifetime love of surfcasting and an occasional hobby of tinkering with carving fishing lures out of wood dowels became Fight Lure Company and an expanding line of unique fishing lures made in his Speonk garage.

“During COVID, I had a lot of free time, like everybody did, and I was messing around out here, making some wood versions of these,” Sanatore recalled in his garage, twirling one of his resin “Frenzy” lures in his hand. “My wife actually said to me, ‘You’ve been talking about doing it for real. Just give it a shot.’”

Traditionally, most artificial surfcasting lures, or “plugs,” were made of wood. In the later 20th century, some large lure makers who could unload thousands of plugs a year turned to plastic. More recently, some DIY craftsmen have started using resin compounds to make lures. Like with plastics, which are only realistic on a very large scale, resin utilizes a mold, into which a liquid is poured that when allowed to set becomes a hard blank that can then be painted.

While he’d previously worked with wood, when he started thinking about production of lures for sale, Sanatore settled on resin, which he said is easier to replicate to exacting standards over and over again and is much more durable than wood when chomped down on by toothy critters like bluefish and tuna.

The learning curve for working with resin was long — buoyancy percentages, weight calculations, mold-making, painting with professional airbrushes, everything was a new calculation or skill to be learned from scratch. After two years of designing and tinkering and redesigning and tinkering some more, the first Frenzy with barbed hooks attached launched from the tip of a surfcaster’s rod in 2022.

The Frenzy is a 4.5-inch lure shaped generally like one of the ubiquitous baitfish known as bunker — it has a large head and deep midsection tapering quickly to a small tail. Unlike many fishing lures, which utilize some form of lip at fore to make them move through the water with an action that imitates a baitfish, the Frenzy relies only on just the right arrangement of weight within its form to make it “swim.”

Making a lure is not as simple as carving or molding a lure into the shape of fish — which itself is not at all simple — and slapping some hooks on it. Balancing weight and the hydrodynamics of the artificial likeness is an intricate ballet of mathematics, field testing and tinkering. Sanatore has a pile of dud lure bodies that are a testament to the weeks of effort put into finding the one with just the right balance — and you better have written it down.

“It’s a ton of trial and error at every step,” Sanatore says. “The resin mix, the placement of the lead. Lots of messing things up and starting over and you have to go through the whole process each time.”

Pouring the resin into the six latex molds he had laid out on his shop table only takes a few minutes, and in just five minutes the molds come apart and a hard plastic Frenzy emerges. But it’s another week before they will be finished, with time allowed for the resin to set, for three coats of paint to dry and an epoxy layer to harden.

“It’s lots of late nights,” the lure maker says.

The 2022 season was the proving ground for all the trial and error. Sanatore himself fished only with a Frenzy this year — though he admits that his new lure-making business, running alongside his own work as a financial controller for Servpro as well as being a married father with a 7-year-old didn’t allow him to get out on the water as much as he would’ve liked. Nonetheless he caught fish up to 40 inches on his creation.

About 500 Frenzys have made it out into the surfcasting world, Sanatore said. Thus far he’s sold most of them — $37 each — through his website, fightlures.com. This month he will make his first appearance on the fishing trade-show circuit. The Striper Day show, in Melville on January 15, always draws a robust lineup of some of the best plug makers in the surfcasting world, and the throngs of fishermen and seasoned collectors who come running anytime their favorite plug-makers are offering their wares.

Sanatore will debut two new models of the Frenzy at Striper Day, a smaller 3-inch version and a larger 6-incher. And in 2023, he says, he hopes to grow his lure line to include a “popper” that splashes loudly on the surface — the version of lure that seeded his lure-making bug back in high school.

“I want to make something that’s just going to create a lot of chaos,” he said.