Home built fishing lure...

An old project I dug up. It's hard not riding

 

Okay, I'll take the bait...

Did you design and build this lure? Did it go into production? I take it, it is for Deep Sea Fishing?
It's pretty cool actually. I prefer fly fishing so I am definitely intrigued with fake bait!
Good Job!

 

Mikie, I am guessing he is fishing in freshwater with that bad boy. Largemouth, stripers, and maybe some large trout will knock the 'boo-boo' out of that thing.

A Fish Story. . . . .

Back in 1993 when AC Plugs first hit the market, I was recovering from carpal tunnel and tendinitis surgery, and in between 15 year gigs at Northrop and Amgen. I was quite into bass fishing at the time, and was getting out with my buddy John Shaver quite often. We ran into Mr. Cole several times and got to know him right when his plugs were just taking off.

He had a couple issues. One was that he was being accused of using live trout instead of his lures by several people. He gave John and I a few of his lures, and we started catching fish with them at Castaic. Big fish. We only ever caught one that was under 5lbs, and that was a 1.25 lb critter that wasn't that much bigger than the AC Plug he tried to eat. Most of the fish we caught were over 8lbs. There was one weekday stretch in February (generally a piss-poor month to bass fish) where we caught a 10 pounder every day that week, Mon-Fri.

My biggest bass on a plug was 12 lbs, 8 oz. We started posting our catches and it started taking some heat off of him being accused of using live bait. John and I were both unemployed and quite good at working with shop tools, so he asked us to help him make lures as the other issue he had was not being able to keep up the demand for these hand made lures that were fetching $40 each as fast as he could spit them out.

We went to his house one day and he showed us how he made them. They were all truly one of a kind as he literally eye-balled the cuts on each one on a small jig saw in his garage. We took every plug he had at the house and took them out to his swimming pool and checked them out until we found the one that we felt had the best action. We took that home with us and blueprinted all of the dimensions and angles of the cuts, and then put together some jigs and fixtures to help us duplicate them in a much quicker and efficient manner. Once we got that going, we decided that John would do the wood working part, and connect them together, and I would paint them, and put the hooks and tails on them.

Allen was a retired house painter, and used what he knew best for the most part. Paint. That came in gallon buckets. His paint jobs were . . . . distinctive, to say the least. I started collecting all sorts of different paints and was using both rattle-can and airbrush to apply the paint and I found a KILLER clear coat called Jolly Glaze that went on clear, was tough as nails, and did not yellow. I was using paint pens for eyes, gills, and spots.

We went to the Fred Hall show that March as part of the 'AC Plug Staff' and were working out of the Turner's Outdoorsman booth. We each took a rod and would walk up and down the aisles that had those shallow pools running down the middle, and just cast the lures up a ways, and then swim them back to us. Turner's sold something like 500 of them that show and ran out before it was over.

We continued to produce lures for several months until one day we received a cease and desist letter from an attorney telling us to stop making them. Weird, as we thought we were more like buddies helping him out. Hell, I would have like to have celebrated with him. Haven't seen or heard from the guy since then. We may or may not have continued to make and sell something that resembled them until we got rid of all the materials we had purchased ;~)

So, I learned a few things about fishing with, and making big plugs, and thought I might share a couple things with you. The first thing I noticed was that I saw the two hooks foul and hook up to each other. I would suggest keeping a large treble on the front, and maybe a smaller one on the back that won't reah the front hook, so they can't foul. Or, you could even try leaving the rear hook off altogether. The truth is, that off all the fish we caught with the big plugs, we NEVER had one caught on the rear hook. ALWAYS on the big front hook. YMMV, but that was our experience. We put the rear hook on because we thought people wanted to see two hooks on a plug that was close to a foot long, but they weren't really needed..

The second thing I'll share with you is that I know these type of plugs will catch fish in a variety of situations, our most consistent success came when trolling them on leadcore line. We would get them down to about 25 feet deep and just as they would start to make contact with the bottom on the main lake points, is when we would get bit. Something about them bouncing off the bottom would trigger those big fish to strike.

So, to keep my verbosity down to merely 'ridiculous', I won't make this any longer than it already is. Your lure has quite a bit of action, and looks to me like it could be a winner. The big fish are likely to hit things they haven't seen before, so you might be able to get some really nice fish. The next several months are big fish months, and fishing for them can be very good. The smaller fish go down to 50-60 feet deep, but the fatties tend to stay up more and even get up shallow when actively feeding. I say, get some paint on that thing, and go slay some hawgs! And, thanks for sharing.

 

We used to put the hook through the back of a live frog and toss it in the canals or swamps of South Florida. NO catch and release with that bait-those large mouth would swallow the whole thing. Might catch a snapping turtle too though!

 

I knew a guy that used to use baby chickens to fish for bass back in Oklahoma. I have seen fish jump out of the water trying to eat a bird that flew down close to the water.

More 'Big Wooden Plug Lore'

I used to fish with a guy that held the 4 lb line class record for largemouth for a while, so he knew how to fish. He was one of those that were skeptical that the big homemade wooden plugs would actually catch big fish consistently. I took him out one day. We didn't started until 10 a.m., so odds were against us catching much that day. I bagged a 12 lb 4 oz beauty that made a believer out of him. He was instantly intrigued with the potential of the big wooden plugs. I made him a custom model that was over 13" long. He was cranking it near the surface at Castaic when a huge largemouth hit the plug. He played it all the way to the boat where he could see that the fish literally inhaled the entire plug so deeply he couldn't see it. Seconds later it broke his 20 lb test Trilene XT line.

He went straight to my house after he left the lake. When I got home from work (I was working again by this time), he was standing on my front porch, trembling, and begging me to make him some more oversized plugs :-D

A year later, he and a partner combined for a six fish limit in a team tournament that weighed 63 lbs, caught on large wooden plugs. I believe that record still stands.