My first fish was caught from a well.
My grandmother’s garden, somewhere in my single digits. I’d tied crochet thread to a stick, bent a pin into a rough hook shape, and pinched a bit of bread on the end. The fish — a small goldfish, technically a Carassius auratus — had no idea what was coming. Neither did I.
That’s the origin story. Not exactly glamorous.
A Long Gap, Then a River Pike
Life gets in the way. University. Work. Marriage. Kids. The fishing stopped for years.
It came back the same way it started — through children and mild desperation. One summer, looking for something to do with my boys (six and ten at the time), I dug out a rod and took them to the water. The day was chaotic and brilliant, and we still talk about it now.
But this time around, something was different. I wasn’t content just to fish — I wanted to understand it. I discovered lure fishing. Then soft plastics. Then the rabbit hole of how they’re actually made.
One thing led to another.
How the Lure Making Started
I won’t pretend I’m designing lures from scratch. Most of my moulds are sourced from the US — top quality, proven designs. What I do is inject them myself, by hand, here in the UK using professional American-made injectors. I occasionally pick up the airbrush for hard lures too.
I experiment with plastisol hardness, action, and above all, colour. Colour is where most of the craft lives for me. I love building colours with depth — transparent layers, natural baitfish profiles, or something altogether flashier. Chameleon and iridescent powders and glitters that shift in the light, that catch the eye of a perch holding tight to a lock gate, that trigger a take when a more ordinary lure gets ignored.
It’s a craft, not an engineering operation. And the more I do it, the more I understand what I’m actually trying to achieve in the water. That education is ongoing. I’m not at the end of it.
Why Competition — But Not to Win
I fish every chance I get, and recently I’ve been entering a few competitions — not to win, but because there’s no better classroom than a pressured venue with a clock running. It makes me a better angler. And being a better angler makes me a better lure maker.
I fish for perch, pike, trout, chub — whatever will take a lure. And when I’m back in Portugal with my boys — 11 and 15 now — we chase largemouth bass and zander together. Different water, same obsession.
What Maverick Tackle Actually Is
A small, honest operation. I make the lures by hand. I fish them. I adjust. I make more. The colours are developed for UK and European water conditions. The product range is focused, not endless.
I’m not trying to compete with the big brands. I’m trying to make things that work, sell them fairly, and share what I learn along the way.
That’s the blog. Honest write-ups, technique notes, session reports — the good sessions and the difficult ones. What worked. What didn’t. What I’m still figuring out.
If you love lure fishing too, you’re in the right place.