Fishing with the Legend
Haven’t been fishing enough lately, that’s for sure. I blame overtime at work and my recent divorce, which we all know can lead to chasing women. This ‘dating’ as it turns out is quite time-consuming, which I did not remember from the last time I was single, before Al Gore invented the Internet. With online dating though, there are numerous emails, and then maybe chat, texting and even phone calls before you ever even meet, so I now spend twice as much time not getting laid.
So when Allan Cole called me in December and asked me to go fishing with him, that sounded like the first good idea I had heard in a long time. Or at least it sounded better than trying to keep a conversation going with JennaXOXO420, who apparently feels that no reply should ever be longer than three words. Allan is the Inventor of the A.C. Plug, and a living legend among west coast anglers, the father of the swimbait revolution. Besides developing and to this day hand-making his iconic namesake lure, over the years Allan has caught 38 west coast brown trout over 10 pounds, 31 striped bass over 40 pounds (including the 63 pound Nevada state record), and countless giant largemouth bass as well. We’ve been friends since 2003 when I caught a big lake trout on one of his lures the first time I tried it. I interviewed him for an article then, and have been a field tester for AC Plugs ever since.
Allan was jonesing for some brown trout fishing, but there are few west coast fisheries for this species that are not either frozen over or closed for the season at this time of year. Tahoe never freezes though, fishing is allowed all year, and we have a good population of wild, hard to catch browns. How badly did Allan want to fish? On December 27 he hauled his boat 450 miles from his home near Las Vegas to mine in South Lake Tahoe.
We fished hard for two days; from the opening of the gate at Cave Rock boat ramp at 6 a.m. to just before closing at 4:00. Trolling in sunny, calm conditions most of the time we found that the shallow bite was tough. On Saturday we trolled East Shore where I hooked a couple of rainbows to sixteen inches on a four-inch AC Skinny on my sideplaner, and Allan caught a four-pound mackinaw on his new Ripbait lure. On Sunday we crossed the lake to West Shore and picked up a few browns to two pounds on the Ripbait and a five-inch AC Skinny. Just like the day before, as the sun climbed higher in the cloudless sky and the morning breeze died, the lake turned to glass and the shallow bite died. Although fishing deep water for mackinaw in Tahoe can provide excellent action even in these conditions, as a true brown trout fanatic, Allan had wanted to stay in the shallows for a better chance at his favorite gamefish.
So I tricked him. Don’t get me wrong, I love browns as much as the next paranoid-schizophrenic trophy-trout angler, but if there’s one thing I love even more than brown trout it’s action. And after three fish between us in five hours and no bites at all in the last two, I hatched a plan.
“You know there was this guy Marty Paradzinski who used to fish Tahoe a lot with lead core line and J-Plugs.” I told Allan. “We called him Lead Core Marty. He caught a lot of big macks but he caught some big browns too. He fished the Camp Richardson shelf, which is right over there.” I said, pointing to the southeast.
“Big browns? How big?” Allan asked. I had his attention.
“A few over ten pounds; I think his biggest was fourteen.” That did it. We tied seven-inch AC Original plugs onto lead core rigs, let out all ten colors of line, and started zig-zagging over the edge of an underwater shelf, steering from forty feet of water to eight feet and back again. Our rod tips telegraphed the message that our lures were pounding the sandy bottom every so often as they passed over the shallower areas at 2.7 miles per hour.
We chose the AC Original because like Lead Core Marty’s J-Plugs, this lure has a scooped face that causes it to dive, wiggle and dart erratically as it moves through the water. The darting action is a deadly trigger for following gamefish, causing them to strike when a sudden movement to the side imitates the evasive maneuver of a panicked baitfish.
Mind you, everything I told Allan was true, but I left out the part about how the ratio on Tahoe for this style of fishing is probably 500 mackinaw hooked for every brown trout. As we trolled, Allan looked at his fishfinder and observed that we were not marking any fish. “You think if this was a good spot we’d see something down there.” He said.
“Ye of little faith” I retorted. “Since we’re only in 60 feet of water, our cone of sonar reading is not that large. And since it’s so damn sunny and calm out, even in 60 feet fish may be moving to the side as our boat comes by, to where they are outside the sonar cone. And most important, I never mark a lot of fish here but I catch ‘em.” Sure enough, after about ten minutes my rod with the rainbow pattern AC original bent over and started pumping. I reeled in a five-pound mackinaw which Allan netted for me. A short while later I caught another mack close to nine pounds. Big surprise, no browns, and no more bites after that but I could tell Allan was tickled that his oldest lure design still produces quality fish. The average mackinaw caught by jiggers and trollers here is in the two to four pound range, so it was fun hooking a better class of fish with the designer of the lure that was catching them.
Allan is over seventy years young, and he is still one the most hardcore anglers I’ve had the pleasure to fish with. We were up well before dawn and fished over eight hours each day. With so few bites we had plenty of time to test lures, and I could tell that his new Ripbait design is going to be a winner. While most AC Plugs troll well up to about three miles per hour, the Ripbait has a slightly different shape to its diving lip and we were getting these lures to track true at over four miles per hour. While we did most of our trolling at slower speeds, the ability to burn the lure at such high speeds without having it roll over or pop to the surface offers more presentation options. Allan had all of his bites during his Tahoe visit on this new creation, and he generously left me some to test further on the big lake as well.
We also had time to trade plenty of jokes and stories, and I have to say Allan has a photographic memory for fishing. He could tell me what time of the morning a fourteen-pound brown trout bit on a trip to Flaming Gorge in 1978, for example. He has also lived an interesting life off the water and shared some hilarious anecdotes each day as we fished and each evening as we had dinner and relaxed afterward. One story in particular stands out and to me epitomizes the independent spirit of Allan Cole. I am paraphrasing here, but I think I can capture the gist of it; true story (imagine it being told in a deep, gruff, old-man voice):
“I was in the National Guard in 1965 when the Watts riot broke out in L.A. They mobilized my company to send in to quell the disturbance. Quell the disturbance they called it, ha ha ha ha! Half the city was burning and they let us out of our troop transport truck in the outskirts. Our company commander told us we weren’t going to get any live ammo. We could hear shots being fired nearby; Pop!Pop!Pop! I told the commander I ain’t going in there without ammo! He said ‘If you don’t go, you’re going to county jail!’”
Allan put his hands out as he told this part of the story, wrists together and palms up as if to say cuff me. “I told him I’d rather be in county jail than dead. Then another guy said ‘I’m not going in without ammo either, so I guess you can put me in jail too’. Next thing you know another guy says the same thing, and then another guy, and pretty soon we had a full-scale mutiny; the whole company refused to go without ammo. Well they needed us, and the cops had better things to do during the Watts riot than arrest a whole National Guard company. So the commander put in a call to his commanding officer, and we stood around for a couple hours while the call went up the line, all the way to Governor Pat Brown. Finally the order came back ‘Okay boys, you’re getting your ammo.’
And we went in. I didn’t shoot anybody, but a sniper was taking potshots at us from a rooftop and one of our guys took him out. When we came across guys in the streets looting stores and setting fires they would see us and ask ‘Y’all got bullets in them guns?’ We’d say ‘yup’, and then they were all ‘Yes-sir’ and ‘No-sir’ to us.”
And that, kiddies, is how Allan Cole inspired the Lynyrd Skynyrd song “Gimme Back My Bullets”. Okay, maybe that’s stretching the story just a little, but Allan it was a pleasure fishing and swapping stories with you and you are welcome back to my house and my lake anytime! Spring brown trout season is almost here and I caught my largest brown, an 11 pound, two ounce Tahoe hen, on an AC Plug! For more information on these unique handcrafted lures, go to acplugs.com.
