BAY OF ISLANDS, NEW ZEALAND — ACTIVE YEARS EARLY 1990s – PRESENT

Graeme "Bonze" Fleet is New Zealand's most recognized big-game lure maker — and his story has a Hawaiian heart. He grew up in the Bay of Islands, the storied water Zane Grey made famous in Tales of the Angler's El Dorado, fishing from the age of three and falling in with local charter skippers who took him under their wing. Handed a high-school tech-class project, he designed his own lure — and the very first day he put it in the water, it caught a striped marlin. Word raced through the Bay of Islands fleet, demand quickly outstripped what he could make by hand, and Bonze Lures was born.

What turned a teenager's school project into a world-class brand was years of refinement abroad — much of it in Kona, Hawaii, where he learned from master captains and lure makers, Bart Miller among them, who were famously exacting about how a lure runs (right down to the way the mono leaders were coiled). He carried that obsession with fine-tuning into his own shop, hand-pouring durable, brilliantly finished heads and pioneering UV additives in both his resins and skirts.

Bonze has proven his designs in the world's toughest marlin fisheries — Cape Verde and the Azores — and become a decorated skipper in his own right: a two-time Billfish Foundation Award winner (2008 and 2009), and the first New Zealander honored as both Top Tagging and Top Release captain for Atlantic blue marlin. His lures keep making headlines, too — a Bonze TKO prototype accounted for the winning 504-pound blue at a major 2024 North Carolina tournament worth more than US$1.7 million. His range runs deep, from the Ballistic (his sentimental favorite, and the first lure he caught a marlin on) to reverse-tapered shapes like the Kraken and El Matador.

As a museum and archive, we're honored to document Graeme "Bonze" Fleet, whose Hawaiian-schooled, New Zealand-built lures compete with the best in the world.

Notable shapes: Ballistic, Kraken (reverse-tapered plunger), El Matador (reverse-tapered cupped face), Here For The Party, Punisher, TKO

Identification tips:

• A modern, branded maker — Bonze labels and packaging are clear
• Signatures: UV additives in resin and skirts, a brilliant hand-poured shine, and reverse-tapered plunger/cupped-face shapes

Below, you’ll find our ever-growing digital archive showcasing every lure that has come through our shop. This collection is constantly evolving as new lures arrive, making it a living record of rare, limited-production lures. We will continue updating this database regularly, building what we aim to be the largest digital archive of offshore trolling lures in the world.

If you have any further information or any lures you believe deserve to be showcased, please reach out to us at ren@luremonger.com