Flashy Fish Lures is a fishing brand founded in Utah. It is headquartered in Saratoga Springs, Utah.
Steve Davis once ran out of lures, put a hook through a dime and kept catching fish. Rainbow trout and kokanee salmon both took it, and a sporting goods store where he showed it began making the "lure" for sale. That dime is the short version of Flashy Fish Lures, the Saratoga Springs company that sells the spoons he spent decades testing on Flaming Gorge Reservoir.
Davis guided on Flaming Gorge for about ten years. A profile posted on the company's site says clients paid him nearly $1,000 a day to chase lake trout from 20 to 48 pounds, and if he did not put them on one, they got a free trip. His research, he said, showed the average angler needed about 100 hours of fishing on the reservoir to land one large lake trout.
The lures came out of that work, and he says he invented his first Flashy Fish lure in 1975. The spoons are cut from thinner metal than ordinary casting spoons, which gives them more side to side flutter and lets them glide over rocks when trolled right on the bottom. When people ask whether he really drags the bottom, he points to his downrigger balls, which are dented from hitting rocks.
Clients begged him to sell the lures for years before he and his family opened the tackle box to the public. The lures are hand painted and sold as made in the USA, and a 2017 column described Davis making them in his office in Ivins. His daughter, Natalie Davis Gibby, now runs the business as CEO while he keeps designing and testing on the water, and the company says about 75 percent of its sales come from repeat customers.
Some of the old secrecy made it into retail. The same column described one lure so guarded that buyers had to pledge not to show it to anyone and keep it in a paper bag until it went in the water, or Davis would not sell them one.
Retired from guiding, he now tests his spoons on southern Utah water like Sand Hollow and the Enterprise reservoirs, still trolling close enough to the bottom to dent the gear. The tackle box he once kept for his clients now ships to anyone, along with the trolling tips he used on the Gorge.
The biggest lake trout ever landed on the Dog House, the boat Flashy Fish's founder guided from on Flaming Gorge, took a Whitey Tighty, a half silver, half white spoon.
