If you don’t think largemouth bass like to eat rats, think again, the intro said to a recent article in Field & Stream magazine.

Great intro, grabbing attention.

The photos – shots like a rat lure climbing out of an aluminum trash can, or another munching on a slice of pizza thrown onto the street – grabbed attention, too.

But one of the lures in particular made me take a second look.

The Matte Rat, from Brian Schmidt Baits, had more of a custom look than the mass-produced rats.

The Matte Rat shown was brown in sort of a rougher, tough-looking, stained-wood finish, with a long, black rubber tail.

It looked disgusting, frankly, like you’d hesitate to touch it.

Perfect, really – this is a rat lure.

That’s unlike the plastic, air-brushed, mass-produced rats with cute pink ears that look like a gimmick.

So I looked up Brian Schmidt on the internet, and saw that the press was giving the custom-lure maker attention.

Then I emailed him, and he wrote right back, saying he was on the water and he’d write more when he finished, and he thanked me.

And he did: he replied later in the day and was very helpful.

Turns out Schmidt is in charge of fishing flies for Umpqua, the world’s largest producer of flies.

But Brian makes a few lures and flies he sells on his own, including the Matte Rat.

“Ultimately, I’m just a guy that really enjoys making baits and seeing (them) help people catch fish,” he wrote in the email.

He enjoys solving fishing problems, and understands issues anglers face, because of his position at Umpqua that he’s worked in during the past 10 years, he said.

The 11-inch Matte Rat is made from balsa wood, because Schmidt wanted to build a rat that weighed less than 2 ounces.

A thin but hard epoxy coats the balsa, and the rat comes in several colors.

The lure imparts a variety of actions, including swimming and diving.

Schmidt also engineered the rat so that on the pause, the garbage-feeder looks over its shoulder slightly, like the paranoid, scared rodent might do in the wild, when it ends up in the drink.

Schmidt’s innovations also include the Schmidterbug, in the photo at left, an ingenious-looking fly-version of the famous Jitterbug hard lure, imparting a similar action.

Anglers might expect such a big lure like a rat to attract big bass, and that can happen.

But you might be surprised how many small largemouths never hesitate to attack, the Field & Stream writer said.

You might want to fish a rat at places like rip-rap, where the mammal might fall into water by mistake.

But anyplace might draw a strike.

“Rats in the mats” is a term anglers use to describe fishing a rat lure in lily pads, after all, and seems the namesake for the Matte Rat.

There’s something about a rodent that makes a bass think food, even if the fish never saw one before, the writer said.

Rat lures, big plugs, aren’t inexpensive, and the Matte Rat is on the high end.

It’ll set you back $100.

The reason, apparently: it’s on the custom, higher-quality, attention-to-detail end.

For more info, visit Brian Schmidt Baits' website.