Soft Plastic Lures: Types, Materials and How to Rig Them

An assortment of soft-plastic lures: seven paddle-tail swimbaits, two curly-tail grubs and three craws — Photo: Danndorfer1914, Wikimedia Commons (CC0)

Soft plastic lures are worms, craws, creature baits, stick baits, flukes, tubes, grubs and swimbaits molded from plastisol, a soft PVC, ever since Nick Creme poured the first worm in 1949. The same bait can go weedless on a Texas rig, through the middle on a wacky rig, nose-hooked on a drop shot or threaded on a jig head. Each rig gives it a different fall and a different job.

Nick and Cosma Creme cooked the first plastic worm in their Akron kitchen in 1949 and sold them by mail, five for a dollar. The tackle trays have never recovered.

Start here

Fishing rigs: the Texas, Carolina, Ned, drop-shot, wacky and shaky-head rigs that put these baits to work.
Senko: the salt-loaded stick bait built to fall flat on a weightless hook.
Swimbaits: from the paddle-tail on a jig head to the big trophy baits.
Glide baits: the big-bait discipline, with its own rods and line.
Chatterbaits: where a fluke or a swimbait goes on as the trailer.

Which soft plastic for which rig?

Family	Typical size	Made for	Reference baits
Straight and ribbon-tail worms	6–10 in (15–25 cm)	Texas rig, Carolina rig, shaky head	Zoom Trick Worm, Creme Scoundrel
Stick baits	4–5 in (10–13 cm)	Weightless Texas rig, wacky rig, Neko	Yamamoto Senko, Zoom Zlinky
Finesse worms	2 3/4–6 in (7–15 cm)	Drop shot, shaky head, Ned rig	Roboworm Straight Tail, Z-Man Finesse TRD
Craws and creature baits	3–6 in (8–15 cm)	Jig trailer, flipping, Texas rig	Zoom Brush Hog, Z-Craw
Soft jerkbaits (flukes)	4–5 1/4 in (10–13 cm)	Weightless on a 3/0–5/0 worm hook, twitched; chatterbait trailer	Zoom Super Fluke
Tubes	3–4 in (8–10 cm)	Tube jig head, smallmouth on rock	Strike King Coffee Tube
Grubs	2–5 in (5–13 cm)	Jig head, swim jig trailer	Kalin’s, Yamamoto grub
Paddle-tail swimbaits	3–8 in (8–20 cm)	Jig head, weighted swimbait hook, weedless	Keitech Swing Impact FAT, Basstrix
Big swimbaits and glide baits	6–12 in (15–30 cm)	Own rods and line; trophy fishing	Huddleston Deluxe, Deps Slide Swimmer, River2Sea S-Waver
Frogs and toads	3–4 in (8–10 cm)	Weedless over grass, buzzed on the surface	Zoom Horny Toad, Strike King Rage Toad

These are the bass angler’s families, because soft plastics were developed for bass. The salt-water section of types of fishing lures shows which go to the surf, and the striped bass pages take it from there.

Which color should you start with?

Green pumpkin. It is Gary Yamamoto’s own favorite Senko color, and BassResource calls it the clear favorite for soft plastics everywhere. In clear water, green pumpkin, watermelon shades and solid black look natural. In stained or muddy water, solid black or black and blue shows up best. Smallmouth are the exception: they often take chartreuse even in very clear water. A bag of 5 in Senkos in green pumpkin is the first soft plastic on the best fishing lures list.

What tackle do soft plastics need?

The rig sets the tackle. Texas rigs and creature baits want a 7 ft medium-heavy baitcaster and 15–20 lb fluorocarbon. The Ned rig and other finesse baits want a 7 ft medium-light spinning rod and 10 lb braid to a 6–8 lb fluorocarbon leader. Yamamoto himself fishes the Senko on a 7 ft light spinning rod with 10–15 lb braid and a 6–14 lb fluorocarbon leader, snelled to a 3/0 wide-gap hook. The hooks hub sizes the worm, EWG and drop-shot hooks.

The big swimbaits are a separate discipline. Tackle Warehouse puts the rods at about 7 ft 4 in to 8 ft, rated heavy to extra-extra-heavy, so that a 4 oz bait sits in the middle of a 2–6 oz rating. Line is 15–17 lb fluorocarbon for 4–6 in baits, 20 lb for 7–10 in and 25 lb or more for the magnums, on 200–300 size reels and a 400 for the biggest. Skeet Reese aims for one or two quality fish per tournament with them.

What are soft plastics made of?

Soft baits are plastisol: PVC resin suspended in a liquid plasticizer that fuses into a flexible solid at about 350–365 °F (176–185 °C). Salt, from a few percent to about 30%, makes the bait denser so it sinks. Many anglers believe its taste makes fish hold on longer. Gary Yamamoto’s Senko is the extreme case: a stick bait with salt spread evenly through the body, designed to fall horizontally on a weightless hook with, in his words, “a continual vibration”.

Scent oils are mixed into the plastic and bleed out slowly as a trail; makers keep them to about 2%, because more weakens the bait. Z-Man’s ElaZtech is a different chemistry, a buoyant, tear-resistant elastomer that stands a Ned-rig bait on its tail. Hardness is a choice too: a softer bait has more action and a shorter life.

How long do soft plastics last, and how should you store them?

A long time, if they stay cool, dark, dry and apart. The plasticizer slowly migrates out of a bait, so an old one turns harder, smaller and finally brittle, and heat speeds that up. Never put ElaZtech and ordinary plastisol in the same tray: each dissolves the other into one melted mass, even at room temperature. Z-Man also warns against long storage below about 20 °F (−7 °C), which makes ElaZtech shrink. Keep baits in their own packets, or in a box labeled worm-proof.

Who invented the plastic worm?

In 1949 Nick and Cosma Creme cooked vinyl, oils and pigments in their Akron, Ohio, kitchen and poured them into a basement mold. The result stayed soft in air: the plastic worm. The six-inch Wiggle Worm, later renamed the Scoundrel, was sold by mail through Sports Afield from 1951 at five for a dollar. At the Cleveland Sportsman’s Show a distributor sold 9,600 in a few days. Texas anglers learned to rig it weedless through brush, demand there exploded in 1959, and Creme opened a plant in Tyler, Texas, within the year.

Tom Mann’s Jelly Worm of 1967 brought the softer, translucent, colored worm. Ed Chambers founded Zoom in Georgia in 1977 by mixing plastic with a trolling motor in a 55-gallon drum; its Super Fluke and Brush Hog defined two of the families in the table.

For the hard baits, go to the crankbait and topwater hubs; every other family is on the lures hub.

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