It all began with a hungry Finnish guy and a carving knife. It was the 1930s when a simple fisherman made an observation of simple genius: Big fish eat little fish, especially little fish that are wounded. So begins the greatest fishing story ever told. As Lauri Rapala fished the waters of Finland’s Lake Paijanne, he quietly rowed and watched. And what he saw was how hungry predator fish would dart into a school of minnows and attack the one that swam with a slightly off-center wobble. Since then, Rapala has expanded into baits of all different material and has maintained their balsa designs.