Impressions: Fishing trends move quickly, and the initial urchin frenzy may have already reached its peak. Today, simply producing another round bait covered in tentacles isn’t especially exciting, and probably isn’t enough to capture the attention of anglers already bombarded with me-too urchin-style offerings. With more manufacturers entering the category, the challenge is no longer convincing anglers that these baits can catch fish. The real challenge is creating one that behaves differently enough to earn a spot in an already crowded tackle box.

Black Sheep is a relative newcomer to the bait game, and their flagship bait is the Bakurai

That is precisely where the Black Sheep Bakurai 17mm gets interesting. Named after the Japanese word for “depth charge,” the Black Sheep Bakurai 17mm Urchin Bait is designed to suspend, trigger, and convert strikes from big bass. It features a unique geometry that is engineered to create added water disturbance, with each element of the bait working together to amplify movement, draw attention, and provoke a predatory response.

The Black Sheep Bakurai features much more texture than your average urchin bait

Operation: At first glance, the Bakurai clearly belongs to the same general family as the Hideup Coike 17mm. There is a central body surrounded by flexible appendages, and both lures rely heavily on the unusual silhouette and secondary movement generated by all of those many protrusions. Look closer, however, and Black Sheep has taken a noticeably different approach.

Instead of the relatively fine, hair-like projections of the Coike, the Bakurai uses longer, heavier and more aggressively textured tentacles. Each appendage has a ribbed profile and enlarged tip, giving the bait substantially more surface area to grab water. That distinction becomes increasingly important once you start moving the lure.

The Bakurai features purposeful geometry from the tentacles to the rounded out ends of each arm

Like many full-size urchin baits, the Black Sheep Bakurai is molded from a proprietary TPE formula that the company says was selected to balance firmness, density, flexibility, and durability while helping the bait maintain its complex geometry. The material is also designed to resist deformation from heat and pressure. As with other TPE baits, the Bakurai is both highly buoyant and impressively durable, but proper storage is important. Contact with conventional soft plastics can cause the material to deform, melt, or even liquefy.

There are two colors to pick from. While I used to fish a lot of urchin baits with spinning gear I soon found that working the Bakurai horizontally with casting gear generated many more strikes

It is almost impossible to evaluate the Bakurai without talking about the Hideup Coike 17mm, as the Coike has become something of a benchmark for this style of lure. Hideup’s 17mm version features a 17mm central body and can be fished in a variety of ways, including weightless, on a dropshot, nail rig, free rig, or jighead.

I prefer smaller flat topped ned style jigs but a football jig works in a pinch

I’ve experimented with plenty of different ways to rig urchin-style baits, including some of the newer purpose-built hook-and-weight combinations designed specifically for the technique. Like so many things in fishing, however, I’ve found that simpler is usually better. My preferred method is to run a jighead directly through the center of the bait. Oversized Ned-style heads with hooks stout enough for the job work particularly well, and even a football head can get the job done in a pinch. When fishing the bait on spinning gear, a larger dropshot hook also works well. My least favorite option is the treble-hook technique. While it certainly has its place, I find that it limits some of the horizontal presentations I like to use and also increases the chances of snagging when fishing around cover and structure.

The Bakurai works well as a traditional vertical drop bait but it really differentiates itself moved quickly

I fished the Bakurai alongside some of my other favorite urchin style baits, including the proven Coike, and found it quite similar in performance when fished vertically. If anything the Coike seems to do well when the bite is tough and a slower more finesse presentation is required. The Coike’s numerous thin strands excel at creating subtle secondary action. Small movements of the rod cause the individual fibers to pulse, quiver and separate, giving the lure an almost living appearance even when it isn’t traveling very far.

A double with Paul from Tackle Warehouse. Paul was fishing with a swim jig and I was fishing the Bakurai in the same deeper open water

This is one reason the traditional urchin presentation can be so effective during the Fall and around suspended or pressured fish. You can keep the bait in the strike zone, give it a small twitch and allow all those fibers to continue doing the work. On the flipside the downside is that many urchin presentations are inherently methodical. They seem to catch fish exceptionally well when bass are willing to inspect a lure, but they are not always the presentation I reach for when I want to search for fish or generate strikes quickly.

While many urchin baits seem best fished with finesse the Bakurai is quite versatile and able to fished both vertically and horizontally

This is where I found the Black Sheep Bakurai very different. One of the biggest surprises during testing was how well the bait responded to faster retrieves. Rather than treating it exclusively as a bait that needs to be fished vertically, suspended, dead-sticked or slowly manipulated, I had a lot of success fishing the Bakurai much more aggressively.

Fishing the Bakurai in the California Delta

Give the Bakurai a sharper twitch or pull it through the water with some speed and those thicker ribbed tentacles come alive. They flex, pulse and push considerably more water than the fine hairs on a conventional urchin. I feel like the extra mass of the balls at the end of the tentacles accentuate that action, not only drawing attention but driving strikes.

The Bakurai also makes for a good scope bait and often draws interest during the fall or with a few twitches

That more aggressive behavior fits nicely with Black Sheep’s stated design goal of creating water disturbance rather than relying exclusively on visual presence. This horizontal fishing style became one of my favorite things about the Bakurai because it changed how I think about primarily fishing an urchin bait.

Instead of making a cast and waiting for the bait to slowly work through a high-percentage area, the Bakurai can be snapped, pulled and worked with considerably more pace. It feels less like you are babysitting the bait and more like you are actively hunting fish with it.

That versatility also gives the Bakurai a potential role beyond the traditional fall urchin bite. While I still like these baits when fish are suspended or keying on slow-moving targets, being able to speed up the presentation makes the Bakurai much more appealing when fish are active or when anglers simply need to cover more water.

A macro view of the Bakurai reveals the geometry of each section in the tentacles and the ball tipped ends

Price and Applications: The Coike remains an excellent bait, and Hideup has continued expanding the concept into numerous sizes, materials and variations. Hideup itself currently offers everything from 13mm and 17mm Coikes to Micro, Mini, Fullcast, soft-material and several other Coike-derived designs.

Hookup is just fine rigged with a single jighead. Other more exotic riggings also work but this simple style gets the job done just fine

For competitors, simply creating another spherical lure with a bunch of appendages is therefore unlikely to be enough. They need a reason to exist. With the Bakurai, Black Sheep's answer appears to be more water displacement and a broader range of retrieve speeds. Whether that difference is enough to make the lure better than a Coike is going to depend heavily on how you fish, but at least it represents an attempt to move the concept forward rather than simply duplicate it.

In terms of overall quality, the Black Sheep Bakurai is excellent. Many Coike alternatives miss the mark by being either too stiff or too soft, but the Bakurai’s elastomer formulation feels very close to the sweet spot. The material has the right balance of resilience, flexibility, and structure, putting it on par with the best baits I have tested in this category.

One of the issues with TPE baits is how to store them. I like using a 3700 deep box with Fishmore T3 Pro kits

Hideup remains the benchmark, and the Bakurai feels so similar in material quality and construction that I would not be surprised if there were some overlap in manufacturing processes or material sourcing. Black Sheep, however, would not confirm any connection, so that remains purely speculation. What is much easier to quantify is the value. The Bakurai retails for $12.99 each, compared with roughly $20.99 for a Hideup Coike 17mm Creature. That is a meaningful difference, especially for anglers who fish these baits regularly or want to keep multiple colors and rigging options ready to go.

Yes, you could put the Bakurai back in the box but they are large and difficult to carry around

The Black Sheep Bakurai is an excellent bait at a very reasonable price, but one area where the Coike and several other competitors still have an advantage is color selection. The two current options, Blood Orange and Green Pumpkin Blue, are both proven, versatile colors that should cover a lot of situations, but the bait is good enough that we would love to see the palette expanded. A purple or Morning Dawn-inspired pattern, a lighter watermelon green, and a near-translucent option would all be welcome additions. Black Sheep did confirm that larger-diameter versions of the Bakurai are already in development, along with additional profiles as the company continues to expand the line. If those future offerings maintain the same level of quality and action as the 17mm, there is a lot to look forward to.

The T3 kit features an embedded pin into a bait holder base that affixes on the bottom of your box with 3M VHB

Urchin Arsenal: Like many of the better modern urchin-style baits, the Bakurai is molded from TPE rather than conventional plastisol, and that comes with some familiar advantages and disadvantages. Both rigging and storage require a little more attention, so I prefer to do as much preparation as possible off the water.

I like using a cutting mat to help space them evenly

The Black Sheep Bakurai has quickly become one of my favorite urchin baits because of the variety of ways I can fish it, so it easily earned a dedicated spot on the boat. There are plenty of ways to store these baits, but one of my current favorites is pairing a deep 3700-style box from Plano, Gamakatsu, or SPRO with the T3 Pro Urchin Kit.

Pinning the Bakurai through the original hole makes them easier to store and rig

The T3 kits are essentially 3D-printed bases fitted with a bait pin and handle. The bases attach to the bottom of the box with 3M adhesive, allowing the baits to remain suspended, separated, and protected inside the box. The system also offers a useful rigging benefit. Because the storage pin passes through the same center hole used when the Bakurai is packaged, it helps preserve and identify that rigging channel. When it is time to fish, locating the center of the bait and threading a hook or jighead through it is much quicker and easier. I store my favorite Hideup and Black Sheep Bakurai baits together in these boxes.

Storing multiple Bakurai with various Coike baits. Yes, they play well together.