Pennsylvania man who makes soft plastic baits says anglers have endless options

If you like fishing with plastic baits like rubber worms, did you ever wonder how those products are made?

A small company in Portage, Cambria County, is producing plastic bait products for sports shops in several states.

Joe Blazauski, 39, is the owner of 412 Bait Co. and Scared Fishless Tackle Co. “It’s where you never have to be scared to be coming home fishless with our baits,” he said with a smile about the company’s name.

He started the company in 2009, but he actually started making his own lures when he was in middle school. In 2019, he bought the 412 Bait Co., that was named after the area code in Pittsburgh.

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The first spinner he designed is called “The Dude,” and it’s been popular for trout fishermen. The name is a tribute to a character in the movie, “The Big Lebowski.” It has a blade and beads on the body that are available in nine colors. “It’s my bread-and-butter lure,” he said recalling when he offered them to fellow anglers along streams.

Now his company is producing all types of soft plastic baits, jig set-ups and spinners. “We pretty much cover all the bases,” he said from his shop garage on the back of his home.

He works in the IT department of a drug wholesale company during the day. “I do like my job, but I’d rather do this as a living,” he said about his future goal of working only for his bait companies.

“Whenever I got into it, there wasn’t many people doing it, at least in this area. Recently it really exploded. There’s little bait companies all over the place,” he said about increased competition.

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When fishing, he primarily uses his own products and is always looking at improving the designs and colors.

“When you catch a fish on a lure that you make, it just feels different. It hits different and whenever you have friends, or friends of friends and acquaintances catching stuff on the stuff you made, it makes you feel good. They’re like ‘this stuff really works.’ It feels great,” he said about the sense of accomplishment that goes with his work.

“This is something that’s made right here in the area, and I can do custom work,” he said about making colors that anglers may not be able to find anywhere else.

Blazauski pours all the plastics for his baits, but his father, Joe Sr., helps with a variety of tasks.

“He’s my right-hand man,” he said about his dad making the jigs, cleaning the shop, making spinners and packaging the orders. The neighbors also help out during the busy times. It’s a friendly bunch of guys who enjoy listening to music and making baits.

The products are made from plastisol that he heats up and mixes the colors before pouring the mixture into a variety of molds. Some products require multiple pours of the liquid to have separate colors. It’s a special technique he said in getting the timing right to have the two different colors gel together. “Every mold is different,” he said about the injection times and temperatures.

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He makes dozens of designs and hundreds of color options. The baits range from worms, hellgrammites, fluke-style baits, leeches and spiders. Most are for bass, but they are also good for panfish, perch and trout. He also has specialty designs for walleye and muskellunge.

The baits can also be infused with a variety of scents, like garlic, crawfish and anise (licorice) to help attract the fish.

It takes practice to have the baits pour clear without bubbles drying into the finished products.

“Overall the most popular color is going to be a green pumpkin or a variant of that,” he said about what sells the most. “All year round you can use green pumpkin.”

He pointed out the natural color is popular for the helgrammites.

His leading walleye product is a drop-shot bait that resembles a minnow called the “The Money Shot” that can be jigged off the bottom of the lake. He sold many of the designs to companies in New York but has also had good success with his products at Lake Erie and Raystown Lake.

He sells wholesale to a variety of sport shops in New York, Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Tennessee, and the general public can visit 412baitco.com online to buy the lures.

“I’m a big swimbait guy,” he said about starting out fishing with a stinger fry and ripple runners. If the bass don’t hit those, he said it means the bass aren’t active and he’ll use a tube bait that he can work a little slower.

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Options are available for those who finesse fish by slowly moving their baits along the bottom, and there are swim-bait designs for those who like to power fish and cast a lot.

“You let the fish tell you what they want,” he said about trying different baits and speeds of retrieval. “It’s always a good idea to have a variety of soft plastic baits. Something you can swim, something you can jig. … and something you can let slowly sink and work back.”

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If the water is clear, he prefers fishing with more natural bait colors. When the water is stained, he recommends darker colors to provide more contrast. Color also plays a big part in matching the hatch, he said about finding crawfish and using something that’s similar in color. In the early spring, he said some crawfish have a blue hue to them.

“Color selection can be based on water clarity or you matching the hatch with the forage species that are in the body of water you’re fishing," he said. "If you match what the fish are eating, you’re going to catch them.”

Brian Whipkey is the outdoors columnist for USA TODAY Network sites in Pennsylvania. Contact him at bwhipkey@gannett.com and sign up for our weekly Go Outdoors PA newsletter email on your website's homepage under your login name. Follow him on social media @whipkeyoutdoors.

This article originally appeared on The Daily American: Portage man explains benefits of soft plastics baits for fishing in PA