The killer sea bass lure for 2011?

Been spending a frustrating few days trying to find out more about this lure - it doesn't seem to be on sale in many places, even in Japan. It's the new Maria Chase Fakebait NL-I. The NL means no lip.Here's a photo:

The lure has a very curious action - or lack of action you might say. Just a hint of a slow wobble. Very shallow (40cm).

Here's a video of its inventor (a certain Mr. Yamada Maru, which I guess is where the company Maria Chase, or Yamamaria, gets its name from), sea bass fishing a rocky mark.

Notice several things about the video.

1. The length of rod he's using.
2. The incredible distance he casts.
3. How he fishes the lure, holding his rod high up to keep his line out of the way of the foreground rocks. He seems to favour a slow retrieve, and let the surf impart a lot of the action to the lure.

Mr. Yamada Maru also has a blog, in which he has plenty of pictures of the Fakebait NL-I doing its business (you'll need to scroll down a bit - beware google mangling of original language!). They actually post a picture of a broken Fakebait NL that's presumably hit a rock at high speed!

Seems a very interesting lure - bit along the lines of the iMotion thing that Jackall are trying to sell with their sierra minnow. It's another lure that swims straight with very little action. I don't know if this is the future for hard lures or not. There seems to be so much success around with Zonks / xraps, which are the absolute opposite of this type of lure. But I have definitely seen bass get spooked by zonks, so this might be a useful thing to have as a back up. Don't know if surf is an essential part of fishing this lure - but I'm sure we have plenty of coastline to match theirs in Japan!

Finally, here is also a link to the Maria Chase page with all the info on, but badly mangled (translated) by Google.

http://translate.google.co.uk/transl...5/Default.aspx

Now all I want to know is - where can I get one?!!