How the Large Bandit helped launch a new force in lure making

For Capt. Nick Durham, a bandit didn’t steal, but rather sealed the deal on his lure-making prowess. It was 2007, the Sydney Game Fishing Club’s Sydney Easter Classic Tournament was underway, and Durham was mating on Capt. Glenn Wright’s 32-foot sportsfisher, Tantrum. “It was super rough. Big ground swell with wind on top. A lot of boats turned back, but we kept going,” says Durham. “We got out to Brown’s Mountain, did a turn down-sea, and I saw a huge blue marlin go sideways on the long corner lure—my pink and black Large Bandit. We fought it for about 40 minutes on 50-pound line in those conditions. It was my first blue marlin over 500 pounds that I got the leader on, and we boated it. We ran in, and it weighed in at 560 pounds. We won the whole tournament. For me, that was a special one: first fish over 500, first leader over 500, in our home tournament, and caught on the first original shape I had designed.” The catch also earned the Game Fish Association of Australia’s Award for the heaviest blue marlin weighed in Australian waters that year.

TACKLING AN EARLY INTEREST

It was on trips to Tonga with his mother as a child that tackle captured Durham’s imagination.. “That’s where I was first exposed to skirting lures and trying different colors,” says the Sydney, Australia, native. Durham handlined for tuna from pangas and caught his first billfish off the island of Vavaʻu in Tonga.

Back home at age 15, he started fishing on Tantrum with Capt. Wright, who according to Durham, was a full-on blue marlin enthusiast. “Even though we had great striped marlin fishing and little black marlin inshore, he’d drive past those and head to the continental shelf to troll for blues all day. Once I saw what blue marlin were all about, I shared the same passion, and that went hand in hand with getting interested in Hawaiian-style lures.”

Up until that point, Durham had only experienced “basic” lures, such as the Australian cup-faced styles. Then he discovered Kona-made Hawaiian lures. Sydney-based tackle shops Harbord Tackle Supply and Bluefin Sports were among the first to bring in Joe Yee and Marlin Magic lures. Long before social media and online ordering, Durham says he remembers ordering a Joe Yee Super Plunger over the phone from a Kona tackle shop and being so excited when it arrived in the mail.

It was the different cuts on the face, the assorted actions in the water, and the craftsmanship of these Kona lures, such as shell and mirror inserts in the heads, which made Durham want to learn how to make lures himself. His first step was purchasing a copy of Jim Rizzuto’s Lure Making 101. “That book helped me learn how to mold an existing lure and reproduce it. What it didn’t teach was how to create your own shapes. How to lathe-turn original heads,” Durham explains.

Durham’s best friend’s father had a home workshop and taught the teenager how to use metal and wood lathes. Soon after, he purchased his own lathe from a machine shop in Sydney owned by a marlin-fishing friend who cut him a good deal. From there, he started turning out his own shapes. “That was the most fascinating part, taking something you imagine and turning it into a lure head you can actually fish.”

THE BANDIT

The first lure Durham made was a simple tube with straight sides and no taper, an easy shape to learn on. He initially turned the design from timber, then molded and reproduced it. As his skills progressed, he discovered he could pour polyester resin into cylindrical PVC pipe and lathe-turn masters from the cured resin blocks. It was at this point, Durham says, “I plucked up the courage to reach out to Bart Miller. He could not have been more helpful. He taught me the finer points of lure making and that fast-tracked my learning curve.”

Durham’s first signature shape is his Large Bandit, which is 12 to 13 inches in length. “It’s probably still one of my most successful shapes and one of my favorites,” he says. “It’s a double-taper shape. It tapers back, then forward. It’s something I created as a hybrid of a couple of designs I liked. It was made purely for blue marlin, because that’s what we were fishing for on Tantrum. In Australia, one popular shape was a Joe Yee Apollo, which had a similar double taper. But I wanted a little larger diameter. Something that ran bigger with more splash, more like a Marlin Magic Ruckus. So, it was almost like combining an Apollo’s double taper with the diameter and face size of a Ruckus.”

At the time, Durham was making his lures by hand in a small shed in the back garden at his parents’ house. When his father saw how committed he was, he told him the shed needed power, and together they dug a roughly 60-foot trench through clay so an electrician could run the wiring. With electricity, the shed became a true workshop, and lure-making turned from a hobby to something more serious. In 2017, Durham formally registered Tantrum Lures as an official business in Australia. Two years later, he moved to Kona, Hawaii, where he currently helms Tantrum, a custom-built 41′ G&S sportfisher. He continues to produce the Large Bandit, along with several other styles.

“We won one of our qualifiers last summer for the Hawaiian Marlin Tournament Series Championship on it. In January, we caught six blue marlin in a single day, and four of them came on the Large Bandit. Four different lures. Four different colors. Every time we put another one out while we were rerigging, it got eaten. That’s when you really see how much the shape matters,” he says. “It’s still the one lure I feel like I have to have in the spread every day during a tournament. I’ve got a lot of faith in it.”

The Large Bandit is a great lure on the short rigger, Durham says. “I personally run it on my long corner because I don’t run massive lures on my corners. It runs great in flat, calm water, but it also holds its own in rough water. I rig it with one of our TTS single-hook rigs, point down.”

LURES TO TACKLE

TTS stands for Tantrum Tackle Solutions, a company Durham launched in 2024. Its product line includes rubber octopus skirts, flash-enhancing STROBEZ, and hooks, with the brand positioned as a tackle company rather than a lure company, while retaining the Tantrum name. Durham says that distinction is important because anglers often have strong loyalties to lure brands, and the separation allows other lure manufacturers to work with TTS without feeling they are supporting a competitor.

The latest addition to the lineup is hooks produced in the company’s own factory, combining an open gape, plough point, needle eye, and Japanese stainless steel for consistent, big-game hook-ups.

Looking ahead to 2026, TTS plans to broaden its hook range with a lighter-gauge version of its current design and a new ringed-eye model aimed at tuna fishermen building double-hook rigs. “The exciting thing is we’re working on a circle hook. That’s our big project for 2026,” says Durham. “The amount of circle hooks people go through compared to stainless trolling hooks is night and day.”

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