LIVETARGET Lures' Slow-Roll Shiner

On Sept. 19, 2019, we published a gear guide about the Ghost Tail Minnow, which is the creation of LIVETARGET Lures of Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario, Canada.

We hailed it as an avant-garde minnow-shaped worm. We also noted that a minnow-shaped worm began playing a critical role in the repertoire of Midwest finesse anglers shortly after April 1, 2006. Back in those days, we called it a shad-shaped worm rather than a minnow-shaped worm. In our eyes, it was a combination of a crude swimbait and an unusual-shaped worm.

Besides the Ghost Tail Minnow, LIVETARGET has a Twitch Minnow and a Slow-Roll Shiner.

This gear guide focuses upon the Slow-Roll Shiner, and we are thankful that Morgan Trojner, who is in charge of LIVETARGET’s sales and marketing, sent us a package of the smallest ones to work with and thoroughly examine.

Here is what we discovered about the Slow-Roll Shiner.

It is manufactured in four sizes: three inches, four inches, and five inches.

According to our measurement, the smallest one is exactly 3 1/4 inches long, which is the ideal size for Midwest finesse applications.

Two inches of it consists of what LIVETARGET describes as its Inner-Core. This section is somewhat oval-shaped.

The Inner-Core is fashioned by a manufacturing process that is called Injected Core Technology, which creates “a proprietary metallic core” with “a lifelike profile and vibrant metallic flash that looks exactly like a real live baitfish.”

In a number of ways, the Slow-Roll Shiner’s snout, eyes, gill membrane, pectoral fin, lateral line, scales, and the contours of its Inner-Core parallel Joseph Tomelleri’s stellar illustrations of the common shiner, red shiner, sand shiner, and fathead minnow. In that sense, those features of its Inner-Core is quite realistic.

The Inner-Core is encased inside a transparent plastic substance that LIVETAREGT calls an Exo-Skin. The Exo-Skin also becomes the Slow-Roll Shiner’s caudal peduncle section and tail, and they are transparent and ghost-like.

At the junction of its head and its torso, which is situated about nine-sixteenths of an inch from its snout, it has a circumference of about 1 3/8 inches and a width of five-sixteenths of an inch.

At one inch from the tip of its snout, its torso has a circumference of about 1 1/2 inches and a width of about three-eighths of an inch.

At the end of its Inner-Core, it has a circumference of about fifteen-sixteenths of an inch and a width of three-sixteenths of an inch.

The dorsal and ventral areas of the first two inches of the torso are endowed with a slot that is 1 1/16 inches long and one-sixteenth of an inch wide.

Its caudal peduncle, which stretches from the end of the Inner-Core to its junction with the tail, is about one inch long. As it approaches the junction with the tail, it becomes flat rather than oval-shaped. At the junction with the tail, it possesses a small flange-like feature along its ventral area.

The Slow-Roll Shiner has a paddle-like tail. Some anglers will describe it as possessing a boot-like tail. Others will note that it has the shape of the sole of a human’s foot. It is flat and thin with a thickness of one-sixteenth of an inch. It has a circumference of about two inches, and it is eleven-sixteenths of an inch long and about three-eighths of an inch wide at its widest spot.

Radiating from the middle of the back of the tail, there is a small and thin flange or ridge. It is about a half of an inch long and three-sixteenths of an inch high at its highest spot.

Because the tail is transparent, its unrealistic features are not readily noticeable. But the tail’s physical features accentuate the way the torso’s Inner-Core area subtlety rolls and undulates when it is being retrieved by an angler.

The rationale for designing a transparent tail and caudal peduncle section was to create a super-finesse presentation, which LIVETARGET calls “a smaller hatch size.” Thus, the 3 1/4-inch Slow-Roll Shiner becomes two inches long in the eyes of a largemouth bass, smallmouth bass, or spotted bass.

The invisible Exo-Skin is said to be “an advanced plastic that has a slight pliability,” and it is “incredibly tough and resilient.”

The Slow-Roll Shiner is available in the following hues: Silver Blue, Silver Brown, Silver Green, Silver Pearl, Silver Purple, and Silver Smoke.

A package of four costs $9.99. 

Midwest finesse anglers will affix the 3 1/4-inch Slow-Roll Shiner to a small mushroom-style jig and present it to their black bass quarries by employing all six of the standard Midwest finesse retrieves or slight improvisations of those retrieves.

Endnotes

1. Here is a link to LIVETARGET Lure’s website: https://livetargetlures.com/collections/ict-1/products/slow-roll-shiner.
2. Here is a link to the Midwest Finesse gear guide about LIVETARGET Lures’ Ghost Tail Minnow: https://www.in-fisherman.com/editorial/livetarget-lures-ghost-tail-minnow/367973.
3. Here is a link to our Midwest finesse column that explains how to employ the six standard Midwest finesse retrieves: https://www.in-fisherman.com/editorial/six-midwest-finesse-retrieves/153946.
4. Joe Tomelleri’s illustrations can be seen in Joseph R. Tomelleri’s and Mark E. Eberle’s “The Fishes of the Central United States.” It was published in 1990 in Lawrence, Kansas, by the University Press of Kansas.

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