Soft Lures and Fantastic non-Plastics

There’s been a gradual change in the soft lures business that most of you won’t have perceived I reckon, but it pulls me up every time I go to write about them now. It’s like this: when these things first came into the limelight, as I recall it with Mister Twister lures in the late 70s or early 80s, they were universally called soft plastic lures. They cost as much then as they do now, and I remember Ross Cusack writing about them in the West Australian after having used them at Quobba. Up against it there Cuey, I thought. Too many things with teeth for soft plastics.  

And they didn’t really take off, but they never went away either. Now, maybe 30 years later, most people still call them soft plastics, but the manufacturers don’t. They call them soft baits. It’s not just linguistics. Over a few decades of development, these lures behave, smell, deteriorate, exude and – sometimes – look a lot more like bait than plastic. 

Berkley’s Gulp! was the real turning point. It was at ICAST 2003, the USA tackle show, that Gulp! received the award for Best New Soft Lures. Later that year, this column in Western Angler magazine reported: 

“Gulp! has the team at Pure Fishing pretty excited. By now, we’re all familiar with soft plastic lures, and Berkley produce millions of them every year. But Gulp!, which is reaching Australia right about now, is the same but different; it looks like a soft plastic lure, fishes like a soft plastic, is as tough as a soft plastic, but… it’s not plastic. What it is, is probably the most closely-guarded secret in the tackle industry today.  

What it means to an angler is that Gulp! is completely biodegradable – after a few months in water, it’s gone. But more immediately important, says Berkley, is that Gulp! is water-based, so (compared to a soft plastic) it releases the inbuilt fish attractants into water 400 times faster than a plastic bait can. And, as a direct result, it catches more fish than soft plastics will – and in some cases, even more than live bait will. 

Berkley take their science seriously. They’ve been working on making Gulp! for 20 years, since before most people had heard of ‘biodegradable’. It took them that long to work out how to do it right. When they throw out a figure like 400 times more scent release than plastic, it’s easy to scoff; but they’re serious.  

When I asked Berkley chemical engineer John Prochnow how they came up with the ‘400 times’ figure, I wouldn’t have been too surprised if his answer had begun with “Aaahh…” It didn’t. “Photospectrometer”, he said. Then he took us into the lab, and showed us. “It’s 412 times, actually”, he added.” 

So back in 2003 I promised to review Gulp! in more detail once we’d fished it locally, but as it happens I haven’t mentioned it again in the past five years. The product really spoke for itself; it began to roll out, grew in popularity, and after a couple of years exploded into being an absolute standard of the industry. There are a lot of people now who simply no longer fish with bait, and a lot of it is due to Gulp! and other soft baits. I think it was really driven home to me one day during a filming session with Dave Butfield on the Swan, fishing for bream for the Hooked TV series. Dave cut up 6” Gulp! Sandworms into bait-size pieces, and fished it just like bait. There was no trying to make it lifelike, bouncing it across the bottom, imparting action or any of that. He just cast it out there, let it settle, and the bream came along and ate it. It’s almost freaky. 

It actually took a little longer to reach Australia than originally forecast, because, unlike plastic lures, Gulp! wasn’t plastic – and immediately hit an obstacle in the form of the Australian Customs Service. They wanted to know what it was and, not surprisingly, Berkley didn’t want to tell anybody what it was. That hurdle was overcome, but only for Berkley’s Australian arm – individuals who try to get the latest colours direct from the USA through the post have reportedly found themselves with a firm letter from the ACS, and no lures. 

There were quite a few wannabee brands that tried to jump on the coat-tails of Gulp!, but none had anywhere near as much success. One that will arrive at the end of this year, that probably does deserve to make the grade, is a similarly monosyllabic product called Slam, which comes from the stable that has been producing the Stimulate and Ultrabite berley products for a few years. Ultrabite as an attractant liquid has a dedicated following and, like Gulp!, has been proven to have fish want to eat it. Unlike Gulp!, Slam soft baits have been developed entirely in Australia and New Zealand (actually NZ should probably get top billing there), though naturally there is a lot of visual similarity to Gulp! products, as could be expected given the latter’s enormous popularity. 

It will be up to individual tastes, and perhaps species and days, as to which of these brands is the right one to be feeding on to a hook.  

So ‘soft plastic lures’ have become ‘soft baits’, because so many of them nowadays are viable as baits, and no longer made of plastic. It seems the best thing about these products, from a fish-catching point of view, is that they exude scents that excite fish into biting them. There is the bonus of the products being biodegradable, for however little difference that may make in the scheme of things.  

But there are still a lot of lures around that really are still soft plastic, and really do work best when made to swim like a fish/crab/prawn/worm/eel or whatever else they have been moulded to imitate. If the non-biodegradable aspect of them doesn’t throw you into a flat spin, it is possible to boost their fish-catching abilities by dousing them in Gulp! juice, Ultrabite, or even plain ol’ fish oil (which is smellier and stickier, not always a good thing). Just a thought. Lots of anglers with personal favourites do this already, and it helps. 

Nick Bailey, from Bluewater Tackle World in Melville, is a recent convert to Gulp! 7” Jerk Shads. Not a lure that has ever been particularly popular in Western Australia, Bailey has found that they catch jewfish at least as well as anything else that can be put in front of a jewie’s nose. Truth be known they’ll attract a strike from most fish they get put in front of, and if 7” is a bit big there’s a 5” version that may better suit. 

Bailey reported on a recent session with Berkley field tester Adam Royter, that the technique was straightforward and reliable. They rigged the 7” Jerk Shads on jig heads moulded on to 7/0 hooks, in varying weights to suit the water depths and drifts. They fished the lures on light gear, just spin outfits with light braided lines, and let the lures hit the bottom before doing, as the lure name would suggest, a succession of quick jerks without a retrieve; jerk-jerk-jerk-jerk-jerk with sweeps of the rod; then let the lure settle again and let the drift take up the slack; and repeat. Along the way, they caught a heap of jewies. 

At this year’s ICAST show, Berkley once again won the Best New Soft Lure award, this time with Gulp! Alive! Crazy Legs Jerk Shad, a further development of what we’ve just been reviewing. The action is getting better, the packaging continues to get more user-friendly, and the colour range evolves. It’s all good.