Introduction to soft plastics

Well, it was about 2 years ago when my mate said to me "Come on lets go down the lake, i have a spot where i'll guarantee you'll catch a flathead" I wearily nodded my head and off we rode down to the lake. When we arrived he looked at me and said "Do you know how to use soft plastics" .... No, i said, slightly embarrased. He gave me a modern looking object with the sinker already attached to the hook and told me to tie it on and he'd rig the soft plastic. When all was good, we both had our first casts as I watched  my K-Mart bought 6lb nylon monofilament drift away with the wind. As I was doing all sorts of stupid things with my soft plastic, I was rudely interrupted with a fish, a flathead at that. Fistpumps and high fives all round, I was stoked and the flathead was only a 33cm. We continued to fish the lake for 6 hours and we ended up pulling around 26 fish from memory. But 2 years gone and i'm not sure whether I should thank my mate or never talk to him again, I've tallied it up and what i've got is $435 worth of bream hardbodies, $90 worth of jigheads, $380 Daiwa Spellbinder/Stradic Ci4 Combo, $480 Daiwa Gekkabijin Infeet/Daiwa Gekkabijin MX 2004 combo, $420 T-Curve Tournament Series/Shimano Stradic FI combo, $170 Pflueger Trion Tournament/Shimano Sienna Combo and probably $150 worth of other fishing accessories. I guess it's just the price we pay to do what we love! Although, all the stats are based on what i have currently and i lost lots of lures when i was learning due to crappy knots. However, i wouldn't regret one bit of it. The pictures provided are two of my first lure-caught fish.