In my endless swimbait purchasing, I always look for one thing above all else. Fishability!

Can I go down the bank with the lure and cast cast cast for an hour or five hours and get good performance from the lure? Or do I have to monkey with the lure all the time, worry about casting it off the shore, worry about it getting tangled every cast, or worry about it breaking?

Some baits excel in fishability. Slammer, Hudd, Triple Trout, Stocker Trout just to name a few. These baits have fishability.

I'm suggesting in my mini-review comments above that the Platinum is the best bait from Castaic in a long time because its fishable! It has good action cast after cast. It doesn't break or tangle up. It just works.

Now, could the trap hook situation be improved? Yes! Because adding a trap hook with this bait knocks down the fishability factor. When you add the trap hook, now you're monkeying with it every 5th cast to line it up on the magnet. Now you're getting a doughnut (that's when your trap hook fouls on the cast).

A counterpoint to the trap hook issue is the fact that the bait is very soft, much like the platinum. If you ever caught fish on the platinum, you noticed that the lure folds up in their mouth and hooks go everywhere. I caught 6 pounders on the 10" platinum that just engulfed the darn thing. That's awesome when it comes to hooking and landing bites.

The Catch 22 is similarly soft. So even with one hook, you'll still land a lot more bites than you would on a comparable 8" rubber swimbait with a single treble on the chin.

In summary... I like this bait and feel like its worth the money. Trap rigging is an issue however. So tradeoffs must be made between fishability and bite to land ratio. That's for you, the user, to work out. I'm still thinking about it and dreaming up the perfect trap rig for this bait.

If I figure it out, I'll share :)