The Last Cast: Why We're Retiring the Original Colors

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Blueberries & Cream. Strawberries & Cream. Cherry Bomb.

If you've been fishing with us since the beginning, you know these colors. They were part of the original Submission lineup — before Stellar Shad, before Orange Pumpkin, before the expanded size runs that came later.

We're retiring them.

Not discounting them. Not running a sale on them. Just letting the existing inventory sell through and then that's it. When they're gone, they're gone.

I want to explain why — and talk a little about what these colors actually meant to how this whole thing got started.

Back to the Beginning

Submission Fishing Co. started in the San Diego bays during COVID. No party boats running. I had a kayak and time to actually fish.

The target was spotted bay bass. They're a technical fish — tight to structure, pressure-sensitive, the kind of species that will ignore a presentation that's even slightly off. Good test fish. Honest fish. They don't give you false information.

I was fishing slow pitch jigging, a vertical technique I'd been learning from Japanese anglers and testing in local conditions. Most California anglers hadn't picked it up yet. The technique worked. The jigs available at the time didn't — at least not the way I wanted to fish them. They were casting jigs. Wrong hook configuration, wrong balance for the vertical fall. I was buying them and modifying them with assist hooks, which got the hookset right but left everything else wrong.

So I started working with a craftsman overseas who was already making the profile shapes I needed. We built to spec — the balance point, the fall action, the hook configuration. And then we made the sizes that were hard to find. The 10g and 15g micros weren't widely anywhere in the US market. We made them.

The Original Colors

I picked those colors for specific reasons, not because they looked good in a flat lay.

San Diego bay water varies. On clear days with good light penetration, natural and contrast profiles both produce. On overcast mornings or in stained water after runoff, you need something that reads as a target — something that gives the fish a clear silhouette to lock onto.

Blueberries & Cream was built around that contrast. The dark-and-light combination gave the jig visibility in low-clarity conditions without going full chartreuse. It caught fish in the bays. It caught fish when we took it offshore. It became one of those colors that was always in the box because it was consistently reliable.

Strawberries & Cream was a different read on the same idea — warmer, more visible in certain light conditions, particularly effective in the early morning when the water color was off and the fish were finicky. I fished it a lot during those early kayak sessions.

Cherry Bomb was the aggressive option. High contrast, strong visual presence, built for when the fish needed something obvious. Deeper structure, rougher conditions, times when subtlety wasn't working.

Those three colors covered a lot of ground together. They were the first real expression of how Submission approaches color selection — practical reasoning from the water, not marketing decisions made on a laptop.

How the Lineup Has Changed

The brand looks different now than it did in the beginning.

The jig lineup expanded significantly. We added sizes, we added profiles, we added colors based on what our prostaff was testing in different fisheries across the country. Stellar Shad came out of specific feedback from anglers fishing it in different water conditions. Orange Pumpkin developed the same way. The expanded size runs on the Sumo and Mercenary happened because we were hearing from anglers fishing depths and species the original micro weights weren't built for.

The lineup got bigger because the fishery got bigger. People started running Submission jigs in freshwater, in the Pacific Northwest, in the Gulf, in places I wasn't specifically designing for when I started. The colors and sizes that work in a San Diego bay aren't always the same ones that work in a Tennessee reservoir. We adjusted.

That's a good thing. But it also means the lineup carries more than it used to — and some decisions have to be made about what stays and what doesn't.

Why We're Retiring Them

Blueberries & Cream, Strawberries & Cream, and Cherry Bomb are being retired in 20g, 40g, and 60g Sumo and Mercenary.

The practical reason is inventory management. Running a full lineup means making real choices about what gets restocked. These colors have had a long run. The newer colorways — developed with more fishery feedback and better finish processes — have been performing well across a wider range of conditions.

The honest reason is that it's time. The lineup has moved forward and these colors belong to an earlier phase of how we were thinking about things. Retiring them makes room for what's coming next.

The Final Run

What's currently in stock is what there is.

If you've been fishing Blueberries & Cream or Strawberries & Cream or Cherry Bomb and you want to keep them in the rotation, now is the time to pick up what you need. Not because I'm pressuring you — because it's accurate information and I'd rather you have it than not.

Once inventory sells through, we won't be making more.

What's Next

The next phase of the Submission lineup is already in development.

New colors based on expanded prostaff feedback. New size runs. Some profile work that I've been thinking about for a while. The goal hasn't changed — jigs that are ready to fish out of the package in the conditions you're actually fishing, built around how the technique works rather than how the packaging looks.

The three original colors did their job. They helped figure out a lot of what Submission is supposed to be. Now we build on that.

  SHOP THE ORIGINAL COLORS.

Published by Submission Fishing Co.  |  submissionfishing.com/blogs/news

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