About Bassline Baits

It started because nobody sold the colour I wanted

Green pumpkin stick worm, big purple flake. Not the fine glitter that’s in every bag on the pegboard, but the chunky stuff that throws a flash when the sun catches it on a slack-line fall. That was the bait I wanted, and nobody in Canada sold it. The closest thing came from a US brand and would have landed on my doorstep around twelve bucks a bag once shipping and exchange were done with it, and it still wasn’t the colour in my head.

So I bought a one-quart pour pot, a used open mould off a classifieds listing, a jug of plastisol and two bottles of colourant, and I wrecked about forty baits on the kitchen table before one came out clean. The first pour cooled cloudy and full of bubbles. The second stuck in the cavity because I got impatient pulling it. The third was the right colour and the wrong plastic, soft enough that it tore off the hook on the first cast.

That’s the whole founding story. There was no plan. I wanted a bait that didn’t exist and it turned out I could make it.

Small batch means exactly what it sounds like

People use “small batch” to mean nothing at all, so here’s the arithmetic. The pot holds a couple of cups of plastisol. The mould takes eight cavities at a time. A pour is a minute or so to fill and set, a few more minutes to cool properly, then every single bait gets its flash trimmed by hand. On a clean night with the plastic behaving, I’ll finish a couple hundred baits in one colour. That’s the ceiling. There is no second shift.

Which means a few things worth knowing before you order. When a colour is out, it is genuinely out. There’s no back room with pallets in it, there’s one person, one pot and a Tuesday evening. And I can’t hedge the way a big company can. They can run four thousand bags of a colour and blow out whatever doesn’t move. If I pour a colour nobody wants, that plastisol and that evening are gone, so I pour toward what’s actually getting bit in the season we’re actually in.

It also means two bags of the same colour poured five months apart won’t be identical twins. Shade drifts by a drop of colourant. Flake settles in the pot as you work, so the first baits out of a batch carry a little less than the last ones. I’d rather say that up front than pretend I have a lab.

Nothing goes in a bag until it’s been in the water

Every new bait and every new colour gets rigged the way it’s meant to be fished and dropped in a tank so I can watch it. Ned rig on a 1/10 oz mushroom head. Wacky rigged on an octopus hook. Texas rigged behind a 3/16 bullet. Craws get hopped like a jig trailer. If a bait only looks good in my hand, that doesn’t count for anything.

What gets pulled:

• Baits that spiral or roll on the fall instead of dropping flat and level
• Tails that need to be dragged to do anything. If it won’t quiver on slack line, it’s out
• Craw claws that lie down flat on the hop instead of flaring
• A trapped bubble in one arm, which makes the bait track off to that side on a slow roll
• Colours that look incredible in the bag and go to a grey smudge two feet down in stained water

That last one cost me the most plastic to learn. Colour in your hand under a shop light and colour at eight feet in tannic water are two different subjects. Red drops out first. A chartreuse tail holds a shape long after the body has gone to a silhouette. Watermelon red looks dead in the bag next to some candy colour and then quietly does the work on clear-water smallmouth. You find that out in a tank and on the water, not off a colour chart.

Rejects don’t get sold cheap. They go back in the pot. Every failed bait in the bin gets remelted together and comes out this muddy brown-purple that I fish myself and will never put on the site.

Why I sell them instead of just pouring for myself

Because I made far more than I could ever fish, because buddies kept asking for bags, and because moulds and colourant and plastisol cost money that has to come from somewhere if the pot is going to keep running. Selling baits is what pays for the next mould. That’s the entire engine. I’d also rather these get thrown at fish than sit in a tote in the garage.

Being small is the advantage, not the apology

I’m not going to out-shelf a big-box store and I’m not trying to. Here’s what I’ve got instead:

• Your email goes to the person who poured the bait. Not a ticket queue.
• Colour requests are a normal thing, not a special program. If you want a laminate with a specific belly for one particular lake, ask.
• The plastic is fresh. Bags that sit in a distribution warehouse for three seasons bleed into each other and go greasy. Mine were poured this month.
• Canadian, and only Canadian. Prices in CAD, shipping is a flat $9.99 or free over $50, and orders go out in one to two business days, because it’s one person and a stack of mailers.

The lineup is built around what people actually chase up here. Largemouth in the pads and around dock posts, smallmouth on clear Shield-lake rock, walleye on wind-blown points and rip-rap, pike and muskie worked along weed edges, crappie in spring shallows and through the ice, and striped bass for the guys out east. If a bait doesn’t have a real job on one of those, I don’t pour it.

If you want the long version, I wrote out how they’re actually made, start to finish, and I keep notes on what’s working and what isn’t in the journal. Otherwise, go see what’s poured and in stock, grab a bag, and tell me what you catch. I read all of it.

— [[NEEDS: his first name]]