Atom Junior Challenge Update

In episode 2 of season 3, the Atom Junior Challenge was born. The idea was simple: make a conscious effort in 2026 to fish vintage original Atom juniors at least once every outing and review the findings at season’s end.

The concept came about because in my effort to fill some holes in my Atom lure collection, I picked up a few older juniors as part of a large lot of plugs I found on eBay. The juniors were not the reason for the purchase, but they were a decided bonus in that they brought me back to years past when I would fish Atom 40s and juniors quite regularly. For one reason or another, I haven’t done so in recent years, but holding several 40-plus-year-old plugs in my hands triggered something. Initially I only intended to bring the idea up in passing before we dug into the meat of the planned subject, but as Jerry and I spoke about it, we thought it might be a fun idea to bring to Surfcast Podcast fans, so the entire episode morphed into a discussion on the Atom junior.

I have since dug several juniors out of my collection, bought a couple new-to-me specimens off eBay, and even took an old broken “ice cream” junior out of the junk bin and turned it into a jointed junior based on the suggestion of a Surfcast Podcast listener. I have been tying color-matched tail flags in-between beast flies on my fly bench for each junior I plan to bring into rotation. I have been fielding questions from listeners on the history of Atoms in their collections or that they found through various internet searches, and I even went as far as to resurrect a Facebook group dedicated to the history of Bob Pond and his Atom Lures that had been lost to time.

While I do not anticipate replicating Frank Daignault’s career accomplishment of landing two 50-pound striped bass on the same Atom junior, I do have high hopes that by the end of the 2026 surf fishing season I will have landed some fish on them and perhaps sparked some more interest in one of the more well-known but somewhat overlooked plug styles in surfcasting history.