Hawaii’s Surface Poppers Part 2: Insights from Locals
GT Fight Club & Peter Dunn-Rankin by Jeff Konn
A few years ago, I had a very interesting meeting with two well-known anglers from the G.T. Fight Club (GTFC). Charles Cintron, the club’s president and an accomplished fisherman, and his associate angler Brain Himalaya, and I made the trek over to the east side of O‘ahu, where we held an informal meeting with Dr. Peter Dunn-Rankin for some topwater lure talk at his waterfront home on the Hawai‘i Kai Marina.
The many questions posed by Charles Cintron and Brian Himalaya were centered mostly around the origins of the PILI “Yap Wonder” lure and how Peter made the lure that forever changed the way we fish here in Hawai‘i for our favorite game fish, the giant and bluefin trevally.
Peter was the true genius behind the very popular PILI Yap Wonder lure. In the late ’70s, when Peter returned to Hawai‘i from Micronesia after finishing his UH Pacific Studies, he wanted to make a lure that duplicated the zigzagging, splashing action that he found with hand-carved wooden prototypes he made while he was teaching in Yap. Upon his return to Honolulu, Peter could have chosen wood as his primary lure material, but Peter wanted to create a lure that was 3D and realistic underwater. He chose clear resin and hand-compressed and shaped high-density surfboard foam to create his floating, fishlike internal core. Hidden inside this foam core was an ingenious one-piece continuous wire. This was a two treble-hook wire, sealed within the lure, eliminating any chance that a broken resin lure body might result in a catastrophic loss of fish.
The biggest attribute of the PILI lure was the fact that
