By Walt Young

For the Mirror

Because our region is blessed with an abundance of great trout waters, many anglers from this area tend to forget the most popular gamefish in this country is the largemouth bass. Not only are largemouths found in every state, but it’s also quite possible that more lures have been designed to catch them than all those for all other species of freshwater fish combined.

I would never be so presumptuous as to suggest which of those countless creations is the best bass lure. I am sure of the lure that hooked me on bass fishing more than fifty years ago continues to be among the deadliest and most versatile lures a bass angler can cast in any water where bass are found, during any season of the year. That is the plastic worm.

Patent records reveal that as early as the 1860s artificial worms were made from the rubber compounds available in that era. Those crude imitations never really caught on, however. The development of the plastic worm as we know it today came much later, beginning with the discovery of flexible vinyl in the 1930s.

By the early 1950s, several individual lure makers were each making their own versions of soft, durable plastic worms. Some were even impregnated with scents like anise or cheese to make them more appealing to the bass. Most important, those creations really caught fish, but often their popularity tended to be regional. One worm maker back then gave away his worms for a while, just to get anglers to try the lures.

The uncanny effectiveness of the plastic worm didn’t stay a secret for long, however, and by the 1960s, plastic worms had achieved a prominent place in the tackle boxes of knowledgeable bass anglers around the country. Most of the worms being used back then were molded to look like facsimiles of a night crawler, although they were produced in some outlandish but fish-producing colors like purple, black, red or blue. And 54 years ago, a blue plastic worm help to launch an event that would change bass fishing forever.

On June 6, 1967, 106 fishermen paid $100 each to fish in the All-American Bass Tournament on Beaver Lake in northwest Arkansas. That event was the brainchild of Ray Scott, a 33-year-old insurance salesman from Montgomery, Alabama. One of the entrants in that contest was a 25-year-old furniture salesman from Memphis, Tennessee, named Bill Dance. Today, both those men are legends in the world of bass fishing.

The success of that first bass tournament allowed Scott to leave the insurance industry and become the founder of the international fishing organization we know today as BASS. It also launched the phenomenon of organized bass-fishing tournaments and professional bass fishermen.

Although Dance finished second to fellow Tennessean Stan Sloan in Scott’s inaugural tournament, he went on to be one of the first stars on the tournament trail, and that success led to a long career as a TV fishing show host, making him one of the most well-known anglers in the world. But many folks don’t realize that Dance holds the unique distinction of catching the first bass in that first bass tournament, and he did it on the very first cast.

Dance had a 60-horsepower engine on his boat, which in those days was considerably larger than what most anglers used. At the starting gun on the first morning of the tournament, Dance left the pack in his wake and was at his chosen fishing spot in just a few minutes. He hooked and landed a 2¢-pound bass on his first cast while watching the rest of his fellow competitors motor by. And his lure of choice for that historic catch was a 7™-inch, blue Fliptail worm.

The interest in tournament bass fishing revolutionized the sport with tremendous advances in equipment and fishing techniques that have ultimately benefited all anglers. It wasn’t long before plastic worms were transformed from simple night crawler look-alikes into all sorts of slinky creations in every size and color combination imaginable and then some. They are also relatively inexpensive lures, allowing even the casual fisherman to carry a good selection of styles and colors in his tackle bag.

There are almost as many ways to fish plastic worms as there are brands of worms on the shelves, but these baits are most effective as probing lures, fished in, around and through cover and structure where fish are holding. One of the most basic and deadly ways to fish plastic worms is rigged Texas-style, using a special worm hook with an offset bend and a bullet-shaped slip sinker. Because the hook point is completely hidden in the body of the worm, this rig can be fished in thick weeds, brush and other nasty stuff that would be impossible to penetrate with virtually any other type of bait.