The AC Plug
I will never forget the first time I met Allan Cole. It was at a Fred Hall show in early 1992, right before the AC Plug really blew up in So Cal. I got Western Outdoor News each week and had read articles talking about the AC Plug but was very skeptical. There was no such thing as a “swimbait” at the time and most of the big bass were caught on crawdads and waterdogs. I was no longer a skeptic after that show.
Allan was casting his lure in one of those long fly casting rectangular pools (can you imagine what the fly guys were thinking when Allan started throwing his 12” lure into their casting pool?) and slowly winding it in. My buddy Kevin and I saw the lure swimming in the water and immediately knew that we needed to get involved in the “big bait movement”. The lure had a very unique action and we knew that big bass were going to eat it. We couldn’t afford $50 for a lure so we went and made our own. We caught many big bass over 10 pounds over the following years on our imitation AC Plugs.
Fast forward 10 years to 2002 and I ended up calling Allan to order some lures to try for big browns up in Oregon. One thing led to another and I ended up building his website in exchange for lures. The relationship grew and as I look at the calendar today I realize that I have worked with Allan for 13 years… and probably know him better than most.
Swimbaits are everywhere now… but that wasn’t the case in 1991. Here is how it all went down. Allan has always been a fishing fool. He started fishing as a kid in Wisconsin and is still pounding it 74 years later. He has 31 stripers over 40 pounds, 41 browns over 10 pounds and 67 largemouth over 10 pounds. He is arguably the best west coast, big fish, freshwater angler in the country. He is under sever scrutiny by everyone and has had to document all of his fish. He is the OG and is legit!
In the mid-1980s Allan lived in Lancaster California. He lived with his wife and 2 kids and painted houses for a living. He would paint all day and sneak off at night to go after one of his favorite fish … the striped bass. At that time there was a large group of anglers (sometimes up to 100 people) that would target these big fish immediately after a trout stock. Most guys were fishing bombers and rebels that were in the 5-7 inch range. Allan realized that the stripers were chasing the trout and decided to carve up his own lure. It was a 12” non-jointed monstrosity with huge internal rattles. He soon began catching huge stripers on it. His son Eric and his friend Darrell caught a 25 pounder on that giant lure and made the cover of Western Outdoor News.
One day Allan and Eric were messing around with the lures in their swimming pool and Allan decided to add a joint to his giant lure and put on a rubber tail. After they watched it swim they looked at each other and realized they were on to something. The AC Plug was born!
Allan actually didn’t fish the new lure for 1 month and just carried it around in his tackle bag because he didn’t think it would work better than the non-jointed 12” beast. Then one afternoon at Pyramid he decided to give it a shot and landed and 18, 20 and 22 pound striper in 30 minutes. He knew he had something special. He took it over to Silverwood and landed a 28 pounder in the first 15 minutes at the lake.
Allan and Eric kept the lure a secret for many years. They continued to catch many big stripers but when asked what they caught the fish on they would just say “a homemade lure”. Many saw the fish they were catching and since the lure was so big they thought they were fishing live trout illegally. A 12” lure at the time was unimaginable.
On December 7th 1991 Allan’s wife Sherri encouraged him to give his lure a try for big largemouth bass since she knew the bass ate trout just like the stripers. Allan was skeptical but decided to give it a shot. This was during the winter and nobody caught big bass during the winter. Allan headed over and started trolling a 12” AC Plug with leaded line and caught a 15 pounder on his first trip ever fishing for bass. He ended up catching 2 more over 10 that trip.
Everyone thought Allan was using live trout so he decided to take a LA Times reporter out to Silverwood and ended up landing a monster 35 pounder on the AC Plug with the reporter in the boat. The reporter documented the catch and the lure. The word was getting out.
Allan went on the weekly bass radio show hosted by Don Iovino and everyone was calling in to accuse him of using live trout. Bass anglers were also mad that the lure had such large hooks and thought the big hooks would hurt the bass. I remember reading about this in Western Outdoor News at the time. It was amazing the number of people that were watching Allan and trying to catch him doing something wrong.
In early 1992 the word about the AC Plug was getting out and Allan had so many people wanting the lure he started making them by hand and selling them for $50 each as fast as he could make them. The demand was so great that people were taking them with the paint still wet.
Many similar lures started to show up in the marketplace soon after. Here are some fun pics of a few of these early lures that were similar to the AC Plug.
The Castaic Lures and Huddlestons came in the mid-1990s and took the realism to a new level. Swimbait realism continues to progress to this day.
Some AC Plug fast facts:
-Allan got the first “Swimbait” Patent issued June of 1996.
-Arbogast started making the lure in 1997 for Allan in a production run.
-Luhr Jensen started making the lure in 2001 for Allan in a production run.
-Optimum Baits started making the lure in 2006 for Allan in a production run.
Allan is big trout angler at heart and has been chasing big browns since the 1970s. In 1998 he made first AC plug for trout. He called it the AC Skinny and took it to Huntington Lake in California to try it out and stuck an 8 pounder on the first day with the new lure. Since then he has landed many huge trout on AC Plugs.
In 2004 he went to a reservoir in Utah for the first time and got 11 and 15 pound brown in a few hours. On another trip in 2010 he went out of state and landed two more browns over ten pounds in just a few hours.
Over the years he has devised a variety of trout lures that target browns, rainbows, bulls, lake trout, cutthroat trout and any other trout that eats other fish. So now if you hear or run into the AC Plug you will know a little about how it all came to be.
Mark Knoch
