Bait makers are plenty in the Mountain State

July 26, 2021|Gregg Thomas||Featured Articles, General

For a small state, West Virginia sure seems to have a lot of muskie-lure makers.

“I tell people about that all the time,” said Jeff Hansbarger, a fisheries biologist for the state Division of Natural Resources. “It’s really surprising that so many muskie-bait makers have become established here, and new ones seem to be popping up all the time.”

The state’s lure-making tradition started in the early 1970s, when a handful of die-hard muskellunge anglers became disillusioned with the quality and fish-catching ability of mass-produced lures.

Their home-crafted lures worked — so well, in fact, that even after more than 40 years they remain in high demand. Those baits, along with those made by Mr. and Mrs. J.C. Dicks of Parkersburg, Mr. and Mrs. Lloyd Jones of Pennsboro and the late Jack Cobb of St. Albans, set standards of craftsmanship and effectiveness for future generations of lure-makers to imitate.

As muskie fishing grew in popularity, so did the number of makers. “At events like the Elk River Muskie Expo, it’s getting hard to find enough room to put all of them,” Hansbarger said.

No one seems to know exactly how many makers are active in the Mountain State at any given time, but current estimates place the number between two and three dozen. “For a state with this small a population, that’s a pretty big number,” Hansbarger said.

Why so many? Hansbarger believes it has to do with West Virginians’ make-do attitudes.

“A lot of our lure makers are hard-working, blue-collar people,” he said. “They’re welders, mechanics, people who are tinkerers by nature. They start making lures because they think they can improve on the lures they’ve been using.”

For Crane, who with wife Sharon produces the Crane Baits line of lures, necessity truly is the mother of invention.

“We’re rural people,” Crane said. “We tend to try to make do with the things we have on hand. I live on a farm my grandpa and grandma worked; if they needed something, they didn’t go out and buy it. They just made it. We kind of do the same thing.”

Mike Milam couldn’t agree more.

“West Virginia is a place where people have always made their own stuff,” said Milam, who manufactures his line of Fat Belly Baits from the basement of his home near Hurricane. “It’s an ingenuity thing. We see how we could do something better, or to put our own little spin on it.

“When I started fishing for muskies, I bought baits and knew in my mind I could make my own. I did, and they ended up catching fish.”

Most other makers got started in much the same way Milam did — they had a notion that they could produce a bait that worked better than the lures they’d been using. They made prototypes, tested them and re-tested them. They shared their most successful patterns with friends and, when the word got out and anglers began clamoring for the hot new lures, they started marketing their innovations.

“Someone fishes with you, sees a lure you’ve made and wants a couple of them,” said Jeff Cantley of South Charleston, maker of Ownage Muskie Baits. “I’m sure every bait maker has a similar story.”

Cantley believes modern social media helped fuel the most recent influx of muskie-lure makers.

“When people got really active on social media, muskie fishing became more popular than it had ever been before,” he explained. “A lot of people got into the sport, and that fueled interest in lures and lure making.”

Most makers are like Cantley, turning out a few dozen to a few hundred lures each year from basement- or garage-based workshops. “In a typical year, I might make 100 or so. I’m not focused on making a lot of money at it,” he said.

Not all makers are low-volume. The Cranes turn out thousands of lures a year from their farmhouse near the Tyler County town of Friendly.

“We just got through putting epoxy coatings on 956 lures in one batch,” Bill Crane said. “You really have to love to [make them]. If we didn’t, we’d never put this much time into it. I make lures for months, Sharon paints them for months, and then we’ll spend days coating them and drying them and packaging them for sale.”

Higher-volume makers are often retirees. Crane, now 77, retired after a long career with Union Carbide. Looney, who has produced as many as 1,500 Amma Bamas in a year, is a retired construction worker.

The sheer amount of labor required to fashion an average muskie lure keeps part-time makers from mass-marketing their wares. Many baits are carved from individual blocks of hardwood and are custom-weighted, hand-painted, epoxy-coated, and individually tuned to produce the proper action — procedures that can take hours painstaking handiwork to complete.

“And if the lure doesn’t work right, it doesn’t get sold,” Hansbarger said. “That’s what sets muskie-lure makers apart from mass producers.”

Not surprisingly, large and elaborately appointed lures can carry price tags of $40 to $60 — which, ironically, creates yet another incentive for would-be makers to start carving and painting.

“When you’re a new muskie fisherman and you go to Cabela’s and look at lures that cost $50, it’s hard to bite off, especially when you believe you could do that yourself,” Cantley said.

With a relatively large number of muskie-fishing enthusiasts engaged in the business, one might makers to keep secret their manufacturing techniques.

Milam said nothing could be further from the truth.

“If you’re willing to ask, almost everyone in the business is willing to tell you how they do things,” he added. “It’s a really good brotherhood to be in.”

Anglers — especially those who live in West Virginia — appear to be attracted by the idea of purchasing lures made by Mountain State residents.

“It’s pretty neat to catch muskies in this state on baits that are made right here of good old West Virginia hardwoods. It really adds to the fun of it,” Hansbarger said. “And a lot of the time, those lures are made by your friends. I get a lot of satisfaction from that, and I’m sure others do too.”

Find all these lures at

https://www.gtdoorsandlocks.com/