If it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck and waddles like a duck, it must be a duck.
That used to be the case with soft plastic lures, begun by Nick Creme cooking them up in his kitchen in 1949. Since debuting at a sport show in 1951, soft plastics have become major lure types. Now they are going natural, even though they still look like the same old plastic.
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The problem with soft plastic lures is that they are polyvinyl chloride, the same stuff that ? without softening plasticizers ? is the white plastic pipe sold at Home Depot. The millions of pounds of soft plastic lures sold annually last hundreds of years ? maybe longer ? before they break down.
This changed several years ago with the development of soft lures that have the same shapes, colors, flexibility and rigging capabilities as plastics but which are 100-percent biodegradable.
Berkley, a division of Pure Fishing, started working with scent-flavored plastic Power Baits. Then in the 1990s it decided to “go green” and began research on biodegradable lures. It took them five years, during which time a few other companies developed other biodegradable lures. These lures lacked texture, flavor, or the rigging ability desired and soon disappeared from the market.
Then in 2000, Pure Fishing debuted Gulp! lures that have the fishing characteristics of PVC soft plastic lures but which are all natural.
Just recently, FoodSource introduced biodegradable lures made from food that, as with the Gulp! lures, are made to resemble natural bait.
There are obvious differences in the several companies. Pure Fishing (Berkley) is making more Gulp! products for saltwater fishing. Fishbites is only available in saltwater scents/flavors, but Carr Specialty Baits is considering the freshwater bass/walleye/crappie/catfish market. FoodSource claims that you can actually feed fish with their lures. But it all looks like good stuff, maybe even the right stuff.
C. Boyd Pfeiffer is an internationally-known sportsman and award-winning writer on hunting, fishing and the outdoors, and he has more than 20 books to his credit. He can be reached at [email protected].
