Local Craftsmen Designs Balsa Wood Flies

When I drove out to Madison last week, I was headed to meet up with a guy that has been integral to countless bass falling prey to my fly rod. This was an opportunity to share the water with someone that I consider invaluable to the fly fishing community and now a friend that I look forward to venturing out again with on some backwater stretch soon.

Our morning started with us pulling off the highway in Verona and following the winding country roads searching for DNR easements and a few hungry trout in the local streams. Trout that we hoped that would be chasing the emerging caddis and crane fly hatches with the warming spring days. There was a bit of cloud coverage that seemed to promise this very magical moment that many fly fishermen seek out each spring and we hoped that the stars were aligning for us appropriately.

My friendship with Jason Martina had built quickly after contacting him about his bass poppers that I had discovered earlier on Etsy. Designed to simulate a distressed frog or baitfish on the surface of the water, he had built off of a time tested design and made it his own with fine touches of love and craftsmanship. Along with the small nuanced changes that Martina had made, he had also designed these particular bugs for fly fishing.

It was a few years ago while looking for gear that I could use to catch bass on top water action with poppers and fly fishing gear that my searches led me to Jason and his Etsy page Bass Pop Fly Shop. I had wanted that same action on warm water that trout fisherman find often on cold running streams and dry flies and here I had found it with Martina’s poppers.

As I navigated through the store front, I found carefully crafted balsa wood poppers with vibrant painted color schemes and bright feathers and legs adorning pencil and frog poppers alike. Patterns mimicking frogs, baitfish and even small trout. Each causing any fly fisherman to take pause and appreciate the delicate attention to detail that Martina places in each piece. Experiments with damselflies and bait fish with foil coloring bringing forth the bright shine of much of the bait found in waters that bass lurk fit appropriately alongside the other poppers. With more than 130 sales listed since opening his Etsy page in 2017, I could tell that Martina had made a remarkable impact on the fly fishing community.

When I first contacted Martina he told me how he had wanted to find a way to make the generic poppers found in many stores a bit differently and to prevent having to replace lost flies with so many purchases.

“I began making my own poppers about seven years ago just for fun and to see if I could” says Martina.

He recalls carving out his first attempt from cork and how it fished but didn’t have the nuances that he has since mastered. As he continued to make small changes and improvements to the poppers, he would share these with his buddies and other fishing partners. The comments that people had about how fish had reacted to his designs and implementing his own observations led to an ever evolving design that often sees a slight change here or there in new products.

Starting with the purchase of balsa wood blanks, Martina cuts the rods down to size and places them in a small device that essentially acts like a lathe. After sanding down the barrels into the shapes of frogs and small pencils he then works out a small cup in the front of each fly that gives it a unique pop when pulled across the surface of any fishy water. Martina varies his hook sizes that accompanies his flies to accommodate the size and the desire of the angler but does recommend following his tried and true pattern setups. He then moves his process to the painting and drying phase.

Encouraged by his friends to try to sell these poppers and the advice of his wife to look into Etsy as a means to do so quickly led to sharing his designs with more people than he had ever imagined.

Having to balance the hectic life of a working dad, Martina often finds himself moving each step of his order completions from one area of the house to another.

“I recently had to scrub much of an entire order after one of my kids knocked over a few wet poppers in the floor,” Martina said chuckling.

Impressively Martina balances teaching eighth grade history in McFarland, Wisconsin while being a husband and dad to three children and manages to push out these orders in a fashion that leaves many of his customers feeling deeply satisfied.

Reviews like “The paint on these flies is spectacular! Almost too nice to fish, but I’m going to do it anyway. I was informed of small delay and received flies as promised,” from Steve Spiekerman. And, “Killer poppers! Pure art! Almost so pretty that ya don’t want to fish them. Crushed a few smallmouth on them,” from Michael Johnson repeat the same praise that every angler has left on Martina’s page.

I’ve personally fished these poppers on much of the Fox River and have even taken them back to Virginia to fish small country ponds and have had great success pulling them across the water. Often after each pull the popper creates a small bubble of disturbance on the water’s surface only to be echoed with a thunderous explosion of a crashing bass swallowing the fly behind it.

Very few flies do I often go back to religiously as much as I do with Martina’s poppers. And it was with a great feeling that I was recently able to reach out to him for a meetup in early April at a Drinking with Scissors event in Madison. Telling him that I wished to write an article for Media Milwaukee about his business, Martina was exuberant with the idea that I wanted to share his story and the poppers of Bass Pop Fly.

This would be the first time that I would meet Martina and I am now honored to be able to call him a friend. Quick conversation and laughs were had while I got to meet much of the fly fishing community that calls Madison home and I got to see the impact that Martina has had with many of these people. Kyle Zempel, owner of Black Earth Angling Co. and host of the Drinking with Scissors events sung high praises of Martina’s craftsmanship and how he has used them in his own fishing ventures.

It wasn’t long before Martina and I were planning our own trips together with our hectic schedules. Each of us balancing our lives as dad’s to young kids, and him as a teacher and myself as a student in his last semester at UWM, found it not so easy to find the right day that our schedules coincided.

But true to his form and his good ethics of how he runs his business, Martina made things work out knowing the crunch of my article and its deadline. So, it was last week that I woke up bright and early and headed to Verona to meet Martina.

Showing me a few of his secret spots, we shared the water for a few hours on Sugar Creek chasing fish on quiet ripples and enjoyed an early spring morning. I got to know the guy a little better that has provided many of the tools I use occasionally in my own pursuits and I learned a few new techniques in the Driftless Area. I was able to watch someone that with their craft that I have admired fish some backwater stretches of Wisconsin sharing their passion of fishing. Swapping stories, Jason and I planned our next trip using some of the finest damn poppers on the market.