Making the bait: How Larry Welcome spun a career out of wood

Photos by Jeremy Garretson

With its 1,600 miles of shoreline, it makes sense that the largest island in the contiguous United States — Long Island — breeds an abundance of saltwater fishermen. 

It also happens to be right in  the migratory path of striped bass,  creating a niche of fisherman so hyper-focused on the mid-Atlantic fish that the term “striper widow” was coined. 

After thousands of casts, fishing tides at all hours of the day and night forges the “striper sharpie,” a fisherman whose line is tight when all others lay slack. And using bait doesn’t count: Anyone can catch with a hunk of meat on the hook. The true purist casts only plugs, pieces of wood shaped and painted to look and act like a fleeing baitfish. 

Sharpies use plugs, and many use bespoke plugs that were designed and built right here on the North Fork—in Cutchogue by Larry Welcome. 

Need breeds ingenuity

Welcome is the designer, builder and proprietor of not one but two fishing plug companies: Northbar Tackle and Sporting Wood Lures. Judging by the fishing awards wallpapering his shop, Welcome is a striper sharpie in his own right, although he balks at the notion. His ancestors might beg to differ: Welcome’s family history in the sea goes back generations—and his great-great-great-great grandfather? That would be none other than Mr. Moby Dick himself, Herman Melville.

Welcome has been selling fishing lures since 1990, but he got hooked on fishing early on. Growing up in the beach and fishing community of Long Beach, N.Y., his family lived in a one-room apartment with a bathroom shared by the entire floor. Welcome found relief from cramped quarters outdoors and started creating fishing lures at a young age, since he couldn’t buy them. Before he and his sister hit double digits, he saw her napping one day and had an idea. He cut a lock of hair from the top of her resting head and tied it onto a jig that had shed its bucktail (a commonly used fishing lure made in part from deer tail hair that, when wet, smooths out and looks like a baitfish) because he had fished it so much. His sister woke to find herself with a new hairdo reminiscent of Alfalfa’s from “The Little Rascals.” It’s been 50 years and Welcome says his sister has yet to forgive him, but the ingenuity he showed back then spawned a life’s work.

That early ability to see raw materials and their potential served him well as a beginner plug builder. When he needed new poppers—a lure designed to “pop” along the surface to get fish’s attention—Welcome used broom and mop handles. Some of his earliest designs started out as staircase balusters. 

Years later, when he was employed as a technician on a team building superconducting magnets at Brookhaven National Lab, he came upon the lure that would define him. On lunch breaks, Welcome began building plugs using metal-working machinery. It was an early bottle plug build snafu that resulted in the lure Welcome eventually patented. 

“I screwed one up. I made the body too thin and the neck too thick,” he recalls. Staring at it, trying to think of how to salvage his materials and time, he saw how further adjustments in shape and weight could create an entirely new plug. Once he swam it and saw it in action, he named it the now famous bottle darter. 

Lured to the East End 

Welcome’s path to the North Fork followed a similar intuitive tug on a line. One of his first jobs as a young adult employed him as a sheet metal worker in New York City in the early ’70s. One fateful weekend, Welcome ventured out to OBI East, later known as Canoe Place Inn, in Hampton Bays. He met a woman there from a place he’d never heard of: the North Fork. Both she (now his wife, Ann) and the place would change his life. 

“I came out to visit Mattituck, looked around and I’m like, I’m never leaving,” he says. “This is it. This is where I want to be.”

Years later, when Welcome had roots down on the North Fork and was turning plugs for himself and friends as a hobby, he was driving his niece and a friend home. The friend noticed the fishing paraphernalia about Welcome’s car and mentioned that her dad liked fishing too. He offered her a plug to give to him. 

The next day Welcome received a call from Ronnie Dietrich, a well-known surf fishing gear innovator from Southold with a house on the Sound. After catching 50 striped bass in his backyard on Welcome’s bottle darter, he placed an order for 350 lures to sell in his direct-mail fishing tackle catalog.

That order forced Welcome to design and build production tooling—some of which he still uses today—and head on down to Riverhead Town Hall to officially do the paperwork to create the business, Northbar Tackle.

Spinning wood (and plastic) into gold

Having both companies—Northbar Tackle and Sporting Wood Lures—gives Welcome an interesting insight into the recreational fishing industry, which generates billions in retail sales annually. 

“When I see fluctuations in the [demand for] plastic, it’s because of whether or not there’s fish around,” Welcome says. “When I see fluctuations in the wood, it’s because of fluctuations in the market.”

But doing both, and doing them with the attention of a fine craftsman, has made Welcome’s good reputation.

As a rule, fishermen value tackle made in the United States, and they have plenty of options when purchasing it. Welcome says they shell out $40 a plug for his wood lures (and around $25 for the plastic versions) because “it’s a niche, and it’s for purists or it’s because they want something made by someone they know, as opposed to manufactured in China somewhere.”

When it comes to plastic, be it for lures or packaging, that can be tricky. But Welcome sources most of his parts domestically, even for his plastic lures, aside from very few scant materials from France and China. “My packaging is all done in the Carolinas,” he notes. “My manufacturing is all done in Massachusetts.”

And instead of a number that goes to a random call center, his direct contact information is right on the packaging. Many customers email him directly for tips and tricks to swimming his plugs.

It was yet another chance meeting that eventually led Welcome to split the business into both wood and plastic lures. At a social at Mattituck Presbyterian Church, a little boy, Rob Kotch, overheard Welcome and a friend talking about weakfish. Kotch begged Welcome to take him fishing. 

“He was really excited and asking all the right questions,” Welcome says. “But I couldn’t just take him fishing.” 

Welcome asked permission from Kotch’s mother, who, knowing her son’s tenacious need to cast a line in the water, eagerly agreed. They caught schoolie stripers and bluefish together in New Suffolk, and the two became fishing buddies.

Kotch went off to college and came home a licensed practical engineer doing 3D design work. In the early 2000s, the two formed a partnership, Kotch wrote the file for the mold and Northbar Tackle LLC started making Welcome lures in plastic.

The wooden lures take a different, more painstaking trajectory. Every wooden lure Welcome makes starts as one of the 18-foot boards he has piled up in his shop hallway. He uses Eastern white pine because of its light weight. “A lot of guys use different woods,” he says, such as Alaskan yellow cedar or maple. “Pine works best because it’s so light that I’m free to weight it any way I want.” 

The boards are cut down to sheets, then to blocks, all pre-measured. The blocks are then shaped into consistent lures using profiles Welcome made himself. While the lure is still spinning in the lathe, he takes varying grains of sandpaper to it to smooth it out. 

The lip of the lure is made using a similar process, but it’s where the build gets tricky. “It’s something that takes repetition to learn it properly,” he says. “When you do your first few, it’s not as scien-terrific. Then, after that it gets down to the point where you’ve done hundreds, in my case tens of thousands, you get it.”

Welcome drills holes completely through the plug lengthwise, makes some holes for the eyes and makes some for the belly weights. He pours his own lead for the weights, too. 

Drilled and sanded lures are then brought into his paint shop just across the hall. He adds wood flour to his thinned epoxy to seal the lures prior to painting. “The epoxy goes from honey to thinner than water and turns a soft pine lure into rock maple,” he says.

Lures catch fish, colors catch fishermen

Welcome sticks to seven paint schemes: blurple (black over purple), yellow, white belly, parrot (a bright green, but not quite chartreuse), white, sand eel (olive with pink haze) and bunker (brownish with spots). 

“I know what works. Every color that I make, catches,” he says. He explains that each color scheme mimics a kind of baitfish. For instance, alewife or herring are a pink haze, with a blue back and silver belly, while yellow and white mimic squid, a striper’s favorite food. “Parrot and blurple are mysteries,” he chuckles. “But they work.” 

The assembly of painted lures goes quickly thanks to Welcome’s ingenuity. He’s designed and built a proprietary tool he uses to finish off the through-wire. He says this mysterious, secret tool streamlines his process to about two seconds, rather than five minutes by hand. 

Gentleman Larry

In 2009 a couple of fishing buddies approached Welcome to start a fishing club, North Fork Anglers. He hesitated.

“I don’t really like fishing clubs. I don’t like joining things. I didn’t even join my wife’s church,” Welcome says with a laugh.

He agreed, however, with the stipulation that he could write the bylaws. They include no foul language, no politics and no talking about your wife.

“My idea was, we’re gonna talk about fishing, and go fishing and we’re only going to invite friends. It’s a gentleman’s fishing club. With women also,” outlines Welcome. He explains that members must be environmentally conscious and not abuse the land or the fishery. He aims to keep it at a level where everyone gets along. 

“The club started with 10 guys, our own little clique,” he says. “Other clubs are fading away, ours is growing.” The club currently has 51 members.

Even though Welcome knows the ins and outs of striper fishing so well that he’s made a career of it, his wife is no striper widow.

He fishes one day a week in the spring and late fall, not at all in the summer and up to five days a week in October during the peak striped bass migration. 

“No more Montauk,” he says of his former days fishing out at the End. “The fishing’s good local.”

The days and weeks between casts are spent playing tennis and golf and spending time with his grandchildren.

“I’m not [obsessed with fishing],” he says. “I like fishing. I don’t have to fish. I really enjoy it, but I don’t have to.”

But for those who are obsessed, it’s Welcome’s lures or nothing. He estimates that 75% of all striper surfcasters carry at least one of his lures in their plug bags, from those that fish up in New England on Cape Cod, down to Cape May in New Jersey—hotspots along the striper coast.

“You wouldn’t believe,” he says, “how many guys have caught their personal best on my stuff.”