Australia is not short on lure designers, but only a handful are pouring molten glass into mould halves to build their bodies. Fishing World has just published a review of one of those builders, and the verdict on the Glasseye range is positive.
Reviewer Zac Panaretos lays out the science before the bite report. Glass-bodied jigs sink markedly slower than the lead heads anglers are used to throwing, because the material itself is much less dense than lead.
"Glass is 4x less dense than lead. 10 grams of lead will be 4 times smaller than 10 grams of glass," Panaretos writes.
The Glasseye line is built around two body sizes. The Oba-Ke, weighing 17 grams, retails at A$29.95, while the lighter 7 gram Bubba-Ke comes in at A$21.95. Both are intended to be worked on a cast-hop-pause retrieve, much the way an angler would fish a soft plastic or a small vibe over inshore reef edges.
The smaller of the two pulled most of its hits during the descent.
"They mostly got eaten on the drop," Panaretos noted.
To connect the body to the line, Glasseye pairs its lures with a Hikari jighead system priced at A$17.95 for three heads, available in 6/0, 3/0 and 1/0. Panaretos rates the 6/0 head as the pick of the bunch for shallow water snapper sessions out to 15 metres, where the slow-fall character of the rig keeps a presentation in front of fish that will not commit to anything dropping fast.
"The slower the lure sinks, the longer it is in the strike zone," he writes.
Tested species across the review included flathead, snapper, Australian bass, mangrove jacks and jewfish, with the work split between estuary flats and shallow reef country. Tracking on hops was clean and the body shape held together against toothy fish, which is no small thing for a glass jig.
One practical adjustment is unavoidable. A 10 gram glass head is bulkier than a 10 gram lead head, simply because glass is so much less dense. Anglers used to compact, finesse-style heads will need to adjust their visual expectations, although the trade-off is the slow sink rate that the lure was designed around in the first place.
For a small builder, breaking through to a national review matters, and Panaretos defends the price point head-on.
"The price range isn't something to be put off by. These lures are not mass-produced and are made on a small scale by two young Aussies," he writes.
Distribution is currently limited to direct sales and a small number of specialist tackle stores, but anglers who already favour slow-fall presentations on snapper, jacks or jewfish now have a credible Australian-made option to slot into the rotation.