Our featured Sponsor for March is Worminator Baits

By night he is a mechanic for Lipton Tea. By day he is -- The Worminator.

When 44-year-old Paul Higgins of Chesapeake came to Virginia almost five years ago, he brought along some California skills and tools to test on Eastern waters. He makes some of the tools, soft plastics, under the name of Worminator, and they catch fish.

Virginia B.A.S.S. Federation president Roger Fitchett says "Paul has been a great supporter" of the state federation for three years and says "he manufactures the most realistic worms that I have ever seen."

Fishing buddies dubbed Higgins The Worminator because he was always using worms in club tournaments regardless of conditions. When he needed a product name as his hobby of making soft plastic lures became a business ten years ago, Worminator was as natural a choice as the lures are a natural look.

Worminator baits grew out of work experience and family help. Higgins used to have a job blending paint to match color chips for a manufacturing company. Coincidentally, his brother-in-law, Californian Ken Matthews, has a business called Lifelike Plastics. Higgins says he "started playing around" with the plastics about 15 years ago, after he started fishing competitively. He figured he couldn't spend as much time on the water as some of his competitors, including the likes of Don Iovino and Mike Folkestad, so he started looking for an advantage in his baits. He put his color blending skills to work with the plastics and, along the way, learned how to match the color of a plastic to another item, such as an old or discontinued fishing lure. As a result, he has found a unique place in the fishing world. He matches colors, such as trailers to hand-painted jigs that others make. Higgins says "people now mail me colors they can't find anymore and I match them. I can see colors really well. I can match baits for guys who can't get those things any more. Nobody else I know does this."

Higgins builds his baits around the philosophy that "everything I do is an advantage for the fisherman at times." It might be 3-D eyes, or scent, or shape, but in some way, at some time, some aspect of each lure creates an advantage. It may be an advantage that produces as little as one fish in a day, but one more fish can win a tournament.

Higgins spends occasional 16-hour days making his lures. "I like to match what fish are seeing, try to blend colors as they are in a crawfish." He has a color called Virginia craw that "looks just like the craws" in Virginia rivers. Among his designs are a new frog that he says looks like a real frog, and a salamander that he says has been effective at Buggs Island. He has put a backbone into his plastic minnows because, while diving in clear water, he has learned that minnows up to 4 inches are transparent but shades of backbone can be seen when looking at a 5 or 6-inch minnow from below. He features another item he describes as a minnow with a body like a Bandit crankbait in front of a grub tail. He likes to use those in clear water, especially on a Carolina or split-shot rig. He feels they give the advantage of stopping a crankbait-style lure during a retrieve and letting it suspend in one spot.

He also cooks scent into plastics, having found a product that he can put into the plastic. He says some scents "will just bubble and plastics won't accept them." He's a strong believer in the effectiveness of 3-D eyes, and they appear on several of his lures.

He makes some baits for California tournament fishermen, who he says "are sneakier. They're always trying to find a color or style that nobody else has." He also makes baits for regulars on the B.A.S.S., Everstart and FLW Tours.

While living in California, Higgins had chances to fish very famous waters long before they became nationally known. He lived in southern California for most of his life, growing up about 30 miles east of Lake Castaic before moving north to the California Delta. He says it was "quite the experience growing up" there, having the opportunity to catch ten fish of eight pounds or more in a day. That wasn't necessarily the norm, but he has the pictures to show it wasn't unusual in the late 1970s and early 1980s. His own personal record is a 15 pound, 8 ounce gem from California's Lake Don Pedro.

The move upstate broadened his fishing techniques. In southern California, Higgins says he would use finesse techniques to fish 14-inch worms in deep water, seeking big bass that were following trout. Moving to the California Delta turned him onto power fishing techniques like flipping and taught him about covering water quickly.

Those California days also gave him chances to watch, learn from, and compete against well-known fisherman such as Bob Crupi, Bill Murphy, Dee Thomas, and Iovino. He would sit at a respectful distance and watch Crupi or Murphy anchor on spots and work their trade. He learned they use big baits and that's reflected in some of his Worminator products. Higgins makes worms up to 24 inches long.

Higgins has had success with his style. While in California he won a Western Outdoors News (WON) pro-am in 1993 and qualified three times for the WON tri-state (Arizona, California and Nevada) championship. He also won his Santa Cruz bass club angler of the year title four times in five years before adding his Virginia club's angler of the year crown to his trophy case last year.

Higgins says the cross-country move to Virginia was very hard. He says he didn't think it would be, but it was "like starting over. It was very difficult to put together any kind of pattern or know my way around. These are big lakes compared to California." He's following his own advice, fishing as a rider on the BFL tour. He says he "used to preach to newcomers to go as a non-boater to learn different styles of fishing," pointing out that "Pro-Am formats are the cheapest way to go on a guide trip."

Now he's showing some of those western-style baits and techniques to the east. He once ushered a friend to Lake Gaston where his buddy caught a 7 ½ pounder on one of his 16-inch worms. He's using western techniques himself as a co-angler on the Bass Fishing League Piedmont Division tour. He qualified for this year's Virginia Mr. Bass tournament.

Higgins says he's turning some Gaston and Buggs Island guides onto big baits and says his Region 7 Hickory Anglers' 6-Man team has had some success with them. Higgins certainly has. He and partner John Tankersley, a Georgia native now living in Suffolk, won last year's Region 7 championship.

If you're interested in a look at Worminator products, they're available by writing Paul Higgins at 705 Sandwillow Drive, Chesapeake, VA, 23320. His phone number is (757) 548-2993. He has no web page at this time.