Ryan Barnes for SPLIT REED
Photos courtesy of Dive Bomb Industries
Dive Bomb Industries has taken the waterfowl industry by storm. Offering high quality silhouettes in anything from wigeon to honkers, to apparel and field accessories. With direct-to-consumer pricing, it’s little wonder that they’ve been able to create such a successful dynamic. With their silhouettes becoming more and more popular each season, Cody Stokes and the Dive Bomb team have set out to add even more versatility to their line-up by creating a new floater duck decoy. Split Reed had the chance to talk to Forrest Carpenter, Pilot of the famous “Dive Bomb One”, and member of the Dive Bomb team to get a review of the new F1 Mallards.
SR: Why did Dive Bomb decide to get into the floating decoy market?
Forrest: Well we’re all duck hunters. All of us enjoy getting out and hunting over water, and I think we realized that as good as our silhouettes are, they don’t float very well (laughs). We just wanted to be able to offer the same thing we do with our silhouettes. We saw an opportunity to offer a high quality product without the price that comes with most floaters. By being direct-to-consumer, which you’ll hear everyone at Dive Bomb talk about, we’re able to sell decoys at the lowest possible price. We don’t have to deal with retailers, mark-ups, or any of those sorts of things. It was just an obvious opportunity for us, and thanks to Cody [Stokes]’ direction, it’s one of those things that came together nicely. Once we got the carver sorted out and saw some of the work that he was doing, it was amazing. It all just really came together.
SR: Dive Bomb has taken over the silhouette industry, but was it harder to get into the floater market where things are a bit more saturated?
Forrest: I don’t think it was difficult to get into the market, but there was a bit of skepticism from our buyers initially; just because they know us as a two-dimensional decoy company. Which is fair- you know? You haven’t seen that sort of decoy from us. But we’ve got a lot of stuff in the works that aren’t necessarily two-dimensional, and really aren’t even decoy related at some points. So there was a little bit of that hurdle to get over, but once the first few people started to get these decoys shipped to them and started taking them out of the box and posting pictures on Facebook or Instagram and all over social media, people jumped on board really quickly. People seemed to be thrilled to death with the quality of them, and as people are going through their first season with them, they’ll see the durability in them that we saw when we were testing them.
SR: What’s significant about HDPE & LDPE plastic used to make the decoys?
Forrest: It’s a nice mixture. It’s not the super, super flexible stuff like you’d see with a bigfoot or some of these other decoys that are really flexible and soft, but they’re also not super hard to the point where they get brittle. When you get a really soft decoy, it gets really hard to get paint to adhere, especially all the different colors of paint. You get a lot better durability for the aesthetics with a harder plastic and a harder decoy, but some of these decoy companies that make really hard decoys and use really hard plastics- when it gets cold, the decoy gets brittle and the plastic can’t hold up. It just gives us the ability to have an “in-between” and find the best fit for what we needed.
SR: How did you guys determine that Jon Jones would be the one to carve these decoys?
Forrest: It’s been close to probably a year since I’ve talked to Cody about it, but basically, from what I understand, he was shopping around and just looking at quality wood carvings and ended up getting in touch with Jon because he was really happy with the work that he was doing. I guess they got in touch, Cody ran the idea by him and they were able to reach an agreement. We’re extremely fortunate to have a carver of his talent level willing to pump out a lot of decoys for us. And like it’s advertised- you don’t see many decoys where you’ve got completely different bodies and heads. It’s not just one body that we slap four different heads on. These are all entirely unique decoys that are carved to have the body match the head pose, and it really captures a more accurate “personality” of the ducks that we’re trying to imitate.
SR: Were these decoys in any sort of a testing process? What did that look like?
Forrest: Oh yeah. We took them out and hunted over them. We adjusted the keels, and the weight of the decoys. Luckily everything went pretty smooth, but there was a lot of stuff we wanted to make sure of before we started selling these to customers.
SR: What was the biggest change that was made during that testing process?
Forrest: Gosh, I want to say it was probably adding more weight to the keel and trying to make that heavier. We wanted to have a super light decoy, and we do well because we can sell a lot of decoys to guys that otherwise couldn’t afford a lot of decoys. I mean, that’s me, I don’t have the money to go buy a bunch of Hard Cores or spend money on leases or do all this other stuff. I’m usually hiking into public, and so are most of our customers. But when it comes down to it, you don’t want to have to go out and right every third decoy you throw out. So the biggest thing I can think of was making the keel heavier, which really isn’t a big change, it’s just a little somethin-somethin’ to make the decoy do what it’s supposed to do. I feel like the carvings were spot on, and they held the paint really well. They really were pretty great from the get go, all of the changes we made were pretty small. I don’t feel like we made any big adjustments.
SR: What do you think really separates these decoys from the competition?
Forrest: They’re not over-stated. They look like ducks! I don’t know if you’ve seen that picture that Nick Costas took remotely of Dive Bomb One flying over the spread, but I was like 5 feet over the top of his camera on the South Platte. That was the first hunt that I had seen the new mallard floaters, I hadn’t held these floaters, I hadn’t even seen a group photo of them honestly. So I was kind of out of the loop on this whole thing. But we were setting up this picture, and I knew where I was going to cross this sandbar, and the best way to get there; I had to get down low on the river, and fly three quarters of a mile at about 50 feet, doing 55 miles per hour or so. Basically what a mallard is doing, or pretty darn close to it. In that three quarters of a mile, I scared up quite a few ducks. I’d say a dozen or 15 mallards. Well as I got up closer, because the guys were sitting in the bushes, I didn’t really know what was what, and I actually thought I was over live ducks! The colors weren’t overdone. They were vibrant enough to be where they needed to be, but they’re not understated- they’re just natural. The poses are just dead on. And the way they swim- it’s nuts! The first time I got to see these things I was just shocked! They just look so good. Especially that high-head drake. I swear to God 100 yards down river I had just passed a drake mallard in that exact same pose, and it looked exactly the same. I was thrilled to take a look at these things in the air, come back around, land, and then get a look at these things in person.
SR: What is your personal favorite part of these decoys?
Forrest: We tried to make a decoy that looks like a duck. Nothing more, nothing less, and I think we hit it on the head. If I had to say something other than the overall appearance, I think the motion. Even in a very light current, I mean super light, like flooded timber light; these decoys will move like crazy. It’s not one of those things that when it’s in a light current it’s great but when it’s in a heavy current it goes nuts. They just move really, really well, and really, really realistically. I was blown away when I stuck these things in a creek for the first time and saw them move. I don’t know what Cody and Jon did to get that sorted out or how they made it happen, but they just move so well.
SR: Are there any plans for different types of floaters in the future?
Forrest: Oh absolutely! Absolutely. We don’t want to jump in and get too deep with too many products and lose touch with the important things like taking care of our customers. We’re trying to just pace ourselves to where we can just consistently keep releasing quality products, as opposed to dropping 10 different species right at once, and having issues with them. Each one of them is going to be a new carving. We’re not just throwing a new paint job on the same carving. There’s a ton of work that goes into it. I think the next one’s going to be a Canada floater, but there’s definitely been talk of pintails, wigeons, that sort of stuff.
SR: Would Dive Bomb ever stray away from making silhouettes and focus just on ducks?
Forrest: It’s tough to say. I wouldn’t rule out other things. The company is named ‘Dive Bomb Industries’ for a reason. Not Dive Bomb Decoys. We’re trying to provide quality waterfowl products. There’s a whole bunch of things beyond goose silhouettes or duck floaters that we can provide to the industry that will be a big asset to a lot of people. While we did start with goose silhouettes, I would say the sky’s the limit. I really don’t foresee us pigeon-holing ourselves into being a silhouette company that makes some other stuff too. You put us down the road 5 years from now, we’re not just going to be a goose silhouette company. We’re a waterfowling product company.
Check out Dive Bomb Industries online for your waterfowling decoy needs!
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