Plastic porn: the tale of two shallow beauties!

Some lures, even those that have a good few years' pedigree, retain an almost mystical attraction for both anglers and fish!  Tackle House Contact Feed Shallow is one of those lures.  This lure gained an unbelievable reputation for sea bass, particularly in one colour: the so called "mullet" (No. 11).  I suspect part of its reputation was founded on the fact that at the time it was both incredibly expensive (~£25) and hard to find.  Indeed, it appeared at the onset of online tackle shops becoming globally available.  Several years on and things are very different.  Better prices, better colours, and better competition from other manufacturers.

Tackle House have recently brought out a whole series of semi-translucent lures (HG).  I've done well on the Feed Shallow in these newer colours, such as the one above.  This is the Feed Shallow 128F- in Slit HG SEGUROKATAKUCHI colour.  It's a darkish silver, with a bronze head and has incredible details, especially those bright red, flared out gills:

Of course, several years after the Feed Shallow first made such an impression over here, there are now other ultra shallow running plugs on the market, such as IMA Komomo II, that are generally cheaper than Tackle House's offering, at least here in the UK.  This is not to say the finish and detail of these two compares - in my opinion, the Feed Shallow is definitely the better quality finished product in terms of how it looks.

But is it a more effective fish catcher?  Not sure about that, the Ima Komomo II catches plenty of fish for me and there isn't much to choose between their actions.  Indeed, if you look at the 105mm version of a Feed Shallow and compare it to the 110mm Komomo II, you can see similarities not just in their mouth shapes:

In terms of their body shape, their backs arch in a similar curve with the 105-FS having a thinner tail but the K2 having a flatter body.  When you look closer at their mouths below, you can see the slightly larger face that the K2 presents to the oncoming flow, giving it a marginally more aggressive action. 

Now I'm not going to say one has been ripped off the other.  The release timings of the two plugs was similar (and while the original 128mm Feed Shallow was one of the first of the ultra-shallow plugs, as Jed points out in his excellent review of the new Komomo 125, the whole trend of shallow running lures for sea bass was perhaps started by Ima with their original Komomo 125 released over a decade ago).  But all this increased competition has left us with two very similar plugs for sea bass in the 5-30cm depth range: the 16g 105mm Feed Shallow and the 15g 110mm Ima K2, notwithstanding the slight differences in action and finishes.

So the question is perhaps now which colours, what prices?  There is nothing quite like the crazy Flashing Joker Plate colour from Ima that's offered by Tackle House, whose colours and finish instead tend to be more realistic.  Maybe the 105mm FS casts slightly further than the K2, and has a slightly "quieter" action.  But one last factor in the equation is that I recently found an online source for both sizes of Tackle House's FS at a price even cheaper than I can buy K2s - so now the playing field is  level, which will turn out to be the better fish catcher?!