What is a soft plastic lure

A soft plastic lure is a soft body of PVC plastisol, cast in a mould: with no hook, no weight and no rigging of its own. It gets all of that from the angler.

Why it does not work on its own

In water a body like this barely sinks and does not hold a direction. To get the lure down to the right depth and keep it moving, it is rigged on a jig head, a weighted hook or a rig with a separate sinker — and this choice alone decides whether it runs along the bottom or through the water column.

The action is built into the shape

A soft lure moves not because it is soft but because its shape is built asymmetrically: a curl or a paddle at the tail deflects in the flow and swings back. A straight body without such an element has no action of its own and moves only by the angler's hand.

Rigged along the axis, not "however it lands"

The hook has to run straight along the body and come out exactly on the centre line. A point off by a few millimetres throws the lure out of balance, and instead of working it starts spinning around its own axis — visible in the hand and in the line twisting after a few casts.

The hook enters through the centre of the nose, and the point exits where the shape provides for it: on lures made for an offset hook the exit point is often marked with a slot along the back. Entering anywhere else throws the body off balance even when the hook itself goes in straight.

How long a single lure lasts

A soft body is a consumable: repeated casting gradually widens the entry hole, and toothy fish bite off the tail. A lure with the tail torn off does not become a shorter lure — it becomes a lure with no action, which is exactly why they are carried with plenty to spare. The entry point fails before the plastic itself tears: it widens sooner than the material rips, so a lure that has started slipping off the hook is replaced, not adjusted.

Size is marked in inches

The pack shows inches, not centimetres: 2", 3", 4". One inch is 2.54 cm, so a "three" is about 7.6 cm long and a "four" 10.2 cm. The number refers to the whole lure including the tail, so two lures of different body shapes marked with the same number can look noticeably different.

What a soft plastic lure is not

A foam-bodied fish lure and a mandula — a jointed lure of foam segments strung on a wire core — are made of other materials and behave differently: they do not stretch and tear the way PVC does, and they hold their shape. They are often fished on the same rigs, but by material they do not belong to the soft plastic class.