Rick Baron, the inventor of the Head Start Rigging System, grew up in the Clearwater, Florida area, loved hunting and fishing, but his favorite was trolling South Florida and the Keys. Rick loved taking friends along, but trolling seemed to always be a challenge because of the ballyhoo rigging.
It all started with another frustrating day of trolling for Mahi-Mahi with friends that he thought could rig Ballyhoo. But Rick spent most of his time that weekend untangling fishing lines from spinning Hoo’s improperly rigged.
Shortly after that trip, while Turkey hunting, he felt that there had to be a easier way to properly rig ballyhoo so anyone could do it. Being an inventor, now holding 28 patents, he started thinking on how to achieve a flawless way to rig Ballyhoo while maintaining a natural swimming action. With his small sketch pad in his fanny pack he started sketching ideas while in the blind and came up with the snap together Ballyhoo Head retaining concept. He designed and tested several ideas, making multiple prototypes at his home machine shop that he would test and refine. With all the learning and testing from prototypes, it all came together.
He took his single prototype and his boat over the Fort Pierce for a test run. It rigged and swam perfectly, and in a short period of time a Sailfish rose and struck at the bait. Rick dropped the line back and hooked up! Now he knew he cracked the code - Wanabe Outdoors was formed with the Head Start being the flagship product.
The work began. Rick working on having the tooling built and artwork made while his wife Lee worked on locating vendors and developing a supply chain. Since Rick had a full-time job as an engineering manager, the every day running of Wanabe Outdoors mainly fell on Lee - she had her hands full building lures, though Rick would help when he could.
With product in hand they set up a booth at the Miami Boat Show in Florida hoping to sell some lures and meet dealers. It was such an overwhelming success that they had to have more product flown to the show to finish the week. Lee would do ballyhoo rigging at the show in less then 20 seconds, and those willing could even try it for themselves.
Although their expectations were focused on South Florida, they were surprised they were getting Global orders from Scotland to Australia and even Fiji. In Scotland, 2002, a record-breaking Brown Trout was caught on the Head Start - 31 lb 12 oz. As the years progressed, fishermen were finding that the Head Start would work for multiple bait fish species around the world. Rick and Lee found one bait shop in South Florida would guarantee if you couldn’t rig a ballyhoo and catch fish on the Head Star,t they would refund your money!!! That was when we truly knew we had a quality product and did it right!
