I remember feeling the weight of the plug as I pulled it off the peg at the tackle shop and thinking, “Now this is a striper lure.” The Spartan look of the Atom Striper Swiper—its cylindrical hard-plastic body, lack of eyes, and simple blue/white swirl pattern with glitter—gave it a much more rugged feel than the largemouth bass lures I was accustomed to. It felt worthy of launching seaward to the seven-striped fish that I’d begun to obsess over. They were the only striper plugs in the land-locked tackle shop southwest of Philadelphia, and I bought one without hesitation.

The Atom Striper Swiper has had the distinction of being the first plug for hundreds of surfcasters over the 70-year history of Atom Lure Company. Bob Pond, creator of Atom lures and champion of striped bass conservation, designed a number of plugs that tamed cow stripers, including the Atom 40 and Junior metal lip swimmers, and the squid imitation, Reverse Atom and the Striper Swiper.

Pond began building plugs in the mid-1940s after finding a weathered Creek Chub lure floating among the bubbleweed in the Cape Cod Canal. Days earlier, he’d watched a fisherman catch several stripers on a lure he seemed intent on keeping secret, going so far as to toss a towel over the fish to conceal what he was using when Pond approached. At the time, most striped bass fishing was done at night using jigs on the bottom. After finding the lure and deducing that it belonged to the secretive fisherman, Pond began building his own plugs, making them larger than the Creek Chub so they could be more easily cast on surf-fishing gear. He sold the plugs to Red Top Sporting Goods in Buzzards Bay, Massachusetts. Red Top held a contest to name the lure, and as a sign of the times, it became known as the Atom plug, after the bomb.

The ponderosa pine that Pond originally made his lure from was prone to absorbing water and losing its action, and by 1949 he moved to plastic, a considerable improvement over wood in terms of consistency and durability.
The Striper Swiper is a topwater popper. It’s heavily weighted for its size to allow for greater casting distance from the beach and to keep the plug from skipping across the surface in heavy surf. This extra weight makes the plug sink, but the slanted, cupped face helps the lure rise to the surface on even the slowest retrieve.

And, it is a slow retrieve that usually gets the bites with the Striper Swiper. A slow, steady retrieve punctuated with a pop every three turns of the reel handle is enough to get the attention of stripers in the surf. The action makes the lure look like a wounded baitfish struggling on the surface and trying to keep from sinking to the bottom.
Pond sold the business in 1998, right around the time I was shopping for my first-ever striper plug. Atom Lures is now part of Hard and Soft Fishing, a parent company to classic fishing brands including Uncle Josh and Acme. The Striper Swiper is one of two lures still being offered by Atom, along with the Atomizer, a bottle-neck popper. The Striper Swiper is currently available in five sizes, from 3/8 to 3 ounces, and four colors, blue/silver, mackerel, red/yellow, and silver/white.

It took a couple years for me to finally tempt a striped bass with my Striper Swiper. I was casting into a calm surf at the north end of Ocean City, New Jersey, just before the sun broke the horizon. I spotted a boil behind the lure that seemed out of sync with the plug’s splashing. A few cranks later, a bass ripped a hole in the water’s surface as it took down the plug. I set the hook, and reeled and pumped frantically to keep the fish away from the nearby drainage pipe that extended into the surf. The fish stole a few clicks of drag, then I began backing away from the water’s edge (as I’d read in surf-fishing books and articles and internet message boards), then a receding wave left the bass exposed on the hard-packed sand. At 26 inches, it would have been a forgettable catch for the few other fishermen I saw working the surf that morning, but it’s a fish I remember as vividly today as the day I caught it more than a decade ago. Its stripes gleamed in the gray pre-dawn light, with the belly hook of the blue-white swirled popping plug locked into the corner of its jaw. I held it up at eye level, my first striped bass on a plug, before unhooking it and gliding it back into the gentle surf.