It’s been nearly two years since Uncle Josh Bait Company announced that they would no longer be offering fishing lures made from pork products. This ended a 93-year run of producing pork rind lures that began with Allen P. Jones and Urban Schreiner carving “frogs” out of fatback during a summer when the actual amphibians were tough to come by. The official reason was that pigs today are being brought to slaughter at a younger age, and the fatback and skin that Uncle Josh required was too thin to make durable fishing lures.
Pork rind was (and is) in my opinion, without equal as a bucktail jig trailer. The fluttering action of the natural material can’t be matched by even the most supple soft plastic, but as we enter the second half of the 2017 surfcasting season, my supply of stockpiled pork rinds has reached a perilous low. In May, I found a forgotten rind dried and shriveled on a bucktail jig hook and wept for an hour. I’m exaggerating, of course. I only cried for 45 minutes.
Durability was always the downside of the pork trailers. Forget to return one to the jar after a fishing trip and you’d find it turned to leather the following day. I’ve been experimenting with reanimating these shriveled rinds with limited success, but even after an extensive soak in brine or fresh water, most are simply too far gone.
With my jars of remaining pork rinds countable on one hand, this spring I got serious about finding replacement trailers.
The first thing I considered was raising a pig and making my own trailers. This might work financially if I find a non-fishing friend to split the costs with me in exchange for however much organic bacon and pork chops you can carve out of a two-year-old hog. Still, this sounds like a time-consuming and messy process, but I…
