Rapala Original Floater

The Original Floater is a slim minnow of balsa wood, a few centimetres long, painted and lacquered to look like a small fish, with a clear plastic lip under the nose and two treble hooks hung beneath. It floats at rest. Pulled through the water it dives a little and swims with a slightly off-centre wobble, and that wobble is the whole point of it.

Lauri Rapala was a lumberjack in winter and a commercial fisherman in summer on the lakes of Asikkala in southern Finland, netting whitefish, trolling for trout and pike, and rowing some fifty kilometres a day. He noticed that pike went for the slow, faltering fish in a shoal rather than the healthy ones, and set out to carve something that moved like an injured minnow. The first that worked, in 1936, was cork, shaped with a shoemaker's knife and sandpaper, wrapped in the foil from chocolate bars and sealed with melted photographic negatives. He made them for the fishermen around him; in 1938 the co-operative shop at Kalkkinen began to sell them.

After the war his sons joined him in a shed turned workshop, and in the 1950s the family gave up farming and fishing to make lures full time. Exports began to Sweden and Norway; a few lures reached America through the embassy in Helsinki and Finnish emigrants, and in 1959 a Minneapolis tackle seller wrote asking to buy them. When Life magazine featured the lure in August 1962, in the issue that reported the death of Marilyn Monroe, annual production rose within two years from 270,000 to 1.6 million.

The cork has become balsa and the foil has become paint, but the shape and the swimming action are the ones Rapala carved, and the company says every lure is still hand-tuned and tested in a tank before it is sold. The factory at Vääksy, in the same parish, remains the centre of its lure making.