The Road to Water Five will be live this winter, but here’s a peek at one of our favorite features from the issue thus far.

Scott Boese’s lure company, Soturi Tackle, held a coloring contest for local children with disabilities from a North Dakota gas station where their lures were sold. The child who could come up with the most creative lure design would have his pattern painted on a Saturi Tackle hardbait. That’s how a young man named Wyatt ended up getting an orange-and-black crankbait that he could rightfully say that he designed. And when Boese and his son Jon sold about 180 of the crankbaits, they took the profit that they made and donated it back to Prarie Grits, the organization that helps disabled children participate in adaptive sports.
That’s not a lure pattern you’re going to find on the shelf at Bass Pro Shops, not yet at least, but it’s a brand ideology we can get behind. Perhaps it shouldn’t come as a surprise that a lure company that was the brainchild of a marine who spent time overseas in Afghanistan and his father would have an altruistic backbone. But what is surprising when you visit Sokuri Takcle’s website is how different these lures look at first glance.
The hue and shades of the hardbait selections is the first thing that will pop out at you on Soturitackle.com. The shades you’re seeing here aren’t ones you’ll soon see on the shelves at at your local tackle shop. There’s a creative, almost magical glow to the shades these guys have painted on lures and the names of the patterns, like ‘Uncle Fester,’ ‘Area 51,’ and ‘Fat Belly Barbie,’ are every bit as original.
“We’d hear the same complaints from a lot of our fellow fishermen,” Boese recalls. “’The other lures, they all look the same.’ We wanted ours to stand out in a school of baitfish. Our patterns are bold, they flash. Half of the patterns we came up with came from pro staffers and customers requesting a specific pattern.’ These guys are actually listening to fishermen on their home water and making lures that are working for pike, walleye and bass right in Minnesota.

“It’s good to have a different looking lure, when fish see something different, it just stands out,” Jon says. And when you consider that many tackle manufacturers are looking to exactly mimic the natural forage of the fish in the lake (i.e. perch pattern, etc.) the Soturi approach is certainly a bold one.
But the Boeses can play match-the-hatch, too. They created a deep-diving crankbait that had a white body and silver stripe that made it a dead ringer for a baitfish called a cisco that was prevalent in some Minnesota lakes. “At that point, we had guys driving from 40 or 50 miles away to get that bait, we got a cult following. They were hooked.”
Although Scott and Jon have been fishing together for as long as Jon could walk, conversations about starting their own bait company began with Jon got back from the service. “He was kind of struggling, so we went to Lake Vermillion in Minnesota and were fishing for between 8 and 10 hours a day for three straight days,” Scott said. “He would talk about his experiences over there, and I was amazed and horrified at the same time.”
“But his attitude changed when we started thinking bout things we could do.” Just as you’d expect from a young man who enlisted for the most dangerous job on the planet, once he put his mind to something constructive, there was no stopping them.
The lure-creation business wasn’t exactly new to the father-and-son team. When Jon was just a boy, Scott whittled down a two-by-four into a muskie bait, painting it and eventually fishing it. It got young Scott’s attention, and the seed was planted for a full-scale project twenty years later.
And Scott is quick to point out that Jon has long been a more dedicated and talented angler than his dad. “When he was in fifth grade, he was already a better fisherman than I was,” Boese says of his son. “In the spring you can see the bass sitting on the beds. Jon would start casting and them and I’d tell him: ‘You’re not going to catch that thing.’ But he’s very determined, that’s his nature, very determined.
In 2019 when Jon moved to Ely, Minnesota to work at a lodge called Smitty’s, not far from the Canadian border, he started taking clients on guided trips in his spare time on a lake called Snowbank Lake. The Lake is so clear, that is has a reputation for intimidating even the best fishermen, because fish are so easily spooked. In other words, your presentation has to be perfect on Snowbank.
“Jon took the time to understand water temperatures, and he established a reputation as the guide on Snowbank Lake,” Scott says. He’s guiding part-time now, and does some ice-fishing guiding as well.
In a that-can’t-be-a-coincidence twist, there’s a lodge called Veterans on the Lake Resort that caters strictly to military veterans and their family members and Jon Boese happened to bump into the owner at a gas station and of course, gave him a free jig. The next thing you knew it, Veterans on the Lake was carrying the Soturi Banshee jig in their tackle shop.
“That’s where things kind of started getting cool,” Scott says in the understatement of a lifetime. “There are tons of veterans up there, and because this tackle company was a therapeutic thing for Jon, it became one for the veterans too as he spent more time with them on the water. They started inviting him out for seminars, and he really established himself up there.”
One of their first creations was called the Banshee Jig, and Scott said that using it while fishing The Mississippi River for walleye in the spring proved that it was more than productive. In fact, their rods were bent so often that other boats would pull right up to ask them what they were using. Eventually, they began carrying and selling extra lures right on the water, and said it became almost like the ice cream truck was coming around when they went out on the water. Guys would hurriedly pull up alongside them, cash in hand, for more Banshee jigs. They took advantage of their newfound fame and had the boat wrapped in a Soturi Tackle design so that they were always ready to sell a sample on the water.

As you might imagine, the Soturi Tackle Pro Staffers aren’t your average fishermen. “One is still active in the Air Force, and our first pro staffer, J.R. Cooper, was a tunnel rat in Vietnam.,” Boese said. Vietnam tunnel rats had one of the most challenging jobs in the war, clearing Vietcong tunnels, which were often booby trapped with grenades, mines, and even venomous spiders and snakes that the VC would leave for American troops. Oh, and agent orange was more concentrated in the tunnels. Cooper was inducted into the Minnesota Fishing Hall of Fame three years ago, so the fact that he’s backing Soturi jigs should tell you everything you need to know about them. Famous Midwestern fisherman Al Lindner was a Vietnam veteran as well, and when his show was a television staple, J.R. Cooper was the scout, finding them the hot lakes to fish.
Boese and his son were sponsoring a tournament in Brainerd, Minnesota, when Cooper walked up to a table at the dinner before the first day, picked up a green jig, and declared that he’d win the tournament with it.”
“I told him that if he won with that lure, I’d make him a pro staffer.”
We know how that story ended. Cooper and his wife Cindy have a lot of records under their belt, according to Boese, including an unofficial state record northern pike. Cooper has a long and storied history as a guide (as a head guide he once had five full-time guides underneath him and 38 on call), lure inventor (Impact Lure Company) and all around Midwestern fishing legend who can read more about here.
What could possibly be more intriguing than a head pro staffer who was a tunnel rat in Vietnam who has 30 guides at his beck and call? What if that pro staffer was the inspiration for a pair of fictional fishermen you have heard of named Max Goldman and Jon Gustafson. That’s right, the film Grumpy Old Men was reportedly based on the exploits of Cooper and his group of guides.
Funding for the start-up came from an altruistic source, too. The Veterans Administration in Minnesota has a program called Vocational Rehab, Boese says, that, if you give them a clearly outlined business plan, will award you with as much as 25,000 dollars to fund your plan. Scott and Jon put together a detailed, thoughtful plan for lure production and their idea was funded, although Jon is still working 40 hours a week managing partnerships for imaging and electronics company Ricoh.
Boese says that as of this writing, they were about maxed out in terms of production capacity. They were, in September, working on ice-fishing jigs, and said that they try to stay about three months ahead of the season in terms of lure creation.
They’ll, on occasion, take an outlier project, like a wooden muskie plug Boese had just finished and shipped to a pro staffer the morning I spoke with him.
Although they have investors pushing them to take the company to the next level, mass producing the baits and scaling up the entire production, Boese didn’t sound too keen on the idea when I spoke with him. He sounded like a guy who, creating a unique, effective and popular collection of lures with his business partner and son, was right where he wanted to be.

The passion for his craft is evident when hear him talk about it. “There are days when I can’t stand this any more but then you look at a table of stuff that you just produced and think you might like to see it get large enough to support our family and stand on its own,” he says.
“I’d like to see it recognized regionally, and maybe even across North America,” he says. “We’re getting Minnesota already.”
He knows they could be in most shops in the state if he had more time to devote to the project, but he says they’re having enough trouble keeping up with demand as it is.
And while his full-time job and lure production keeps him from getting on the water as much as he’d like, he says that he’ll still get in three or four trips in the summers. “But when a customer sends a picture of a fish we’ve caught… I know, everything we’ve done has been successful.”
At the moment he’s thinking of scaling back Soturi, perhaps choosing ten of their most popular baits and producing those on a regular basis. He likes that, as a small company, he can stay nimble, introducing and nixing patterns as the market for each changes.
On the Soturi Tackle website, there’s a YouTube Video featuring what sounds like an alt-rock anthem by an artist named Sam Tinnesz. The lyrics ring out again and again, “This is how legends are made.”
But the star of the video isn’t a heavily tattooed pro fisherman, a tournament angler with a sponsor-sticker covered bass boat sporting twin outboards or scantily clad, sun-kissed coeds in tropical locations. No, the video is entirely devoted to an angler who appears to be a little bit shorter than four feet tall. But here’s surprising thing about that video: The kid is holding up fish after fish that most of us grown adults spend our summers chasing. He’s got kype-sporting brown trout, big pike and perch that are pushing a pound.
“That’s our grandson, Easton,” Scott Boese says with a smile in his voice. “He always wants to paint his own lures.” Repeatedly producing, catching the fish we’re all out there after, with a proven product that’s unique and created with care, quality and character… is exactly how legends are made. And we wouldn’t be surprised if, keeping an eye on Soturi Tackle in the coming years, we didn’t see that process unfold, one bait at a time.