In his live bait business, Shawn Clark of Rogers handles more worms in a week than some fishermen see in a lifetime.

There's a flaw, he says, in the plastic versions of real worms anglers thread on hooks. Most have a straight shape uncharacteristic of a juicy, wriggling live worm.

"I look at millions of worms, and they're not straight. If I see a straight worm it's usually dead. It's hard to catch a fish with a dead worm," said Clark, who owns Vaughan's Bait Farm in Springdale.

Live worms are part of the inspiration behind a unique S-shaped plastic worm Clark has developed and patented. The curvy baits, marketed under the brand name Slinker plastic worms, act more lively in the water than straight-shaped artificial worms, Clark said.

What really set Clark to work designing his Slinker worms was a snake that met its end in the maw of a big black bass.

"I was fishing on the Arkansas river in a flat-bottom boat using a bubble-gum colored Slug-Go around some cypress knees," Clark recalled.
While he worked the bait a few inches underwater, a small water snake came slithering across the surface toward the boat.

"I started watching this snake, then there was this big wave under my Slug-Go and a bass about 4 pounds goes right by my Slug-Go and nails the snake 10 feet from the boat," Clark said. "I thought, "If I can come up with something like that, with that much action, I might really have something."
Clark spent a year tinkering with his idea. He made plaster of Paris molds and hand-poured several versions of worms with the S-shape of the snake the Arkansas River bass swallowed whole.

When he finally had the worm he wanted, Clark was so confident in its fish-catching ability he hired a patent attorney. That was in 1995. Finally last November, the patent came through on Clark's Slinker plastic worms.
The entrepreneur hopes to have the worms available at tackle stores by mid-June. They'll come in 10 colors, from pearl to darker hues like green pumpkin.

The worms are 8 inches long when stretched straight. Clark plans to market a shorter, thinner finesse worm in the future.

Slinker worms can be used like any other plastic worms, Clark said. They can be fished Texas- or Carolina-style, or rigged weightless.

"The difference is they have a lot of motion," according to Clark, "and create quite a vibration going through the water."

That, he said, is due to the bait's S shape and concave underbelly that runs the length of the worm. The marketing slogan, "Because worms aren't straight," was emblazoned on the Slinker Pro Team shirt Clark wore at Beaver Lake Tuesday morning while demonstrating his new worm.

He rigged a pearl-colored worm with no weight and cast toward some bushes. When Clark twitched the rod tip, the worm straightened out, but recoiled back to its S-shape when tension was relaxed.

Days earlier, in the clearer water of Lake Atlanta near downtown Rogers, Clark worked a weighted worm along the bottom. The action was the same. The worm straightened, then recoiled, just like the water snake that inspired the lure's design.

A weightless pearl-colored worm has been productive in the high water of Beaver Lake. Clark has been catching bass with it over flooded bushes. An hour of fishing Monday evening yielded some 2-pound spotted bass and a 3-pound largemouth.

"Through Clark's advertising agency, one of the worms ended up in the tackle box of a Texas angler. Jerry Paine of Round Rock fished a Slinker worm in a lake near Austin. Paine said he used the worm until the bass - including an 8 pounder - tore it up.

"I fished it on a Carolina rig," Paine said. "I just started throwing it around and caught some really nice fish."

Paine believes the worm will work in heavily fished lakes like the one he fishes in Texas, or Beaver Lake, due to the lure's unique design.

"The fish (in Texas) are highly pressured, and if you throw them anything that looks different, if it looks like any kind of food, a bass is going to hit it," he said.

"Taking the worm from an idea to a patented product has been a long journey, Clark said. Besides designing the worm and going through the arduous patent process, he had to oversee details from the logo design to finding the right plastic bag to package the baits.

The first prototypes were formed in a mold that made one worm at a time. Clark contracted with a plant in Mississippi that is now producing Slinker worms by the thousands for their June retail debut. Stores that will carry the worms include Hook, Line and Sinker in Rogers and Bella Vista, MHF Outdoors in north Springdale and Southtown Sporting goods in Fayetteville.

"If I can get people to just try them," Clark said while fishing with the lures Tuesday, "I think they'll have good results."

U.S. Patent # D453,205 S

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