On the Cover
Match-the-Hatch Has Met Its Match!
live
target
words by // Mike Pehanich / www.smallwatersfishing.com
N
o brand has taken lure-making to
the level of fish-fooling art quite like
LiveTarget Lures!
Fooling fish has been a self-described “lifelong
passion and obsession” of Grant Koppers,
founder, president, creator and inspiration for
LiveTarget Lures. Many a fish his company’s
baits have tricked, but many an angler they
have left in awe as well.
I am proof of the latter. The first time I picked
up a LiveTarget lure – a crankbait with such
painstakingly accurate perch-like features – I
didn’t know whether to tie it to my line or build
a glass case for it in my library.
The truth is that the lure industry has not
been the same since LiveTarget began filling
tackle shop pegboards with lures made with
the bold baitfish realism he had challenged
himself to create.
Company lore has it that Grant Koppers
grew up fishing the crystal waters of Lake
Ontario, primarily for salmon and trout. Those
species remained his primary targets when
he launched his guide business, Sport Fishing
Niagara, in 1996, though he would also branch
out to take walleye, musky and smallmouth
bass in the neighboring waters of the Niagara
River and Lake Erie.
Page 13 | Fishhound Mag
Koppers partially credits the zebra mussel
for launching his lure-building career and
LiveTarget business, which is headquartered
in Niagara, Ontario, with warehouses in
Toronto and Buffalo, New York.
He had noticed the dramatic increase in
clarity in the Great Lakes since the arrival
of these invasive filter-feeding mussels. His
guide business taught him, too, that predatory
species had become increasingly more
discerning and discriminatory in these waters
where even anglers could at times see bottom
at mind-bending depths.
Increased water clarity was not just a local
phenomenon either. It was happening all over
the country as zebra mussels and quagga
mussel populations spread to new waters and
aquatic vegetation flourished.
Yet fishermen were still throwing the same
fish-shaped mannequins they had used before.
In 2005, LiveTarget set out on the makeit-like-Nature course that would make his
company famous -- a quest to build lures that
were as “anatomically accurate” as the baitfish
spit up in his livewell.
It was a formidable task, and early returns
came with stops and starts, grunts and groans.