Lure Allure A.C. Plug’s Steep Price Is No Object To Diehard Bass Fishermen Who Say If It Works, It’s Worth It

Allan Cole never planned to start a bass fishing revolution. In fact, the Lancaster, Calif., resident was never much of a bass fisherman at all. Before 1990, Cole fished mostly for brown trout or striped bass.

It was stripers that gave Cole the idea for the A.C. Plug, a lure that is butting its wooden head against the economic ceiling for fishing lures. Unlike the so-called glass ceiling in business, the fishing industry’s economic ceiling is an elevator with the control button locked on “UP.”

Sticker shock is a term generally associated with new cars. Even the angler who shells out $25,000 for a shiny new pickup truck might balk at paying $22.95 for a jointed wooden plug that looks like a bigmouth broom handle.

“I never thought I’d see the day I could sell a fishing lure for $22.95,” said Bill Barlow of Barlow’s Tackle Shop in Richardson, Texas. Barlow was the first Dallas-area retailer to handle A.C. Plugs. He’s sold about 300 of them. “One old boy bought six A.C. Plugs at one time, and his bill came to nearly $150.”

Maybe the guy’s a speculator. Original lures handmade by Allan Cole in his garage are bringing $50 on the secondary market.

When Cole realized he’d need the biggest garage in California to keep up with demand for A.C. Plugs, he sold his patent to the Arbogast lure company.

Arbogast is producing A.C. Plugs in three sizes - 7.5-inch, 9.5-inch and 12-inch. The 12-inch model weighs 4 ounces. You’ll laugh when you see it for the first time.

You might not laugh when you hear that Arbogast has sold about 60,000 of the high-dollar lures in the last two months.

Texas fishing guide Johnny Glass doesn’t think it’s funny. Glass has been heaving A.C. Plugs since early December and figures he’s caught 50 bass on the midsized model. The smallest of those 50 bass weighed 6 pounds, 7 ounces.

“Bass will come up out of deep water to hit this lure, and you won’t catch small fish on it,” Glass said.

Cole, who has a vested interest in believing his own hype, can document 65 fish bigger than 12 pounds caught on A.C. Plugs from two California lakes in the past two years. Cole says it has gotten so bad in California that fishermen are claiming to have caught the fish on some other lure, just to keep competitors from fishing A.C. Plugs.

Two 17-pounders have fallen to the lure. Perhaps the best documented catch came at California’s Lake Casitas last April when a two-man tournament team used A.C. Plugs to land six bass that totaled 63.5 pounds.

Cole doesn’t worry too much about fishing technique. The lure can be reeled slowly and kept right on the surface or it can be reeled faster and made to dive just under the surface. Unless you do some exotic rigging, the A.C. Plug won’t dive much deeper than two feet.

“It can be trolled with lead line or the depth can be carefully controlled by trolling with downriggers,” said Cole. “You can’t get a bass fisherman to troll, though.”

Cole first toyed with a fishing lure design when he saw striped bass at California’s Pyramid Lake chow down on rainbow trout being stocked by hatchery trucks.

At first he painted other trout-shaped plugs to look like rainbow trout. None of the lures were big enough. Then Cole made his own, oversized plugs. He made them jointed to enhance the action. His son came up with the idea of adding a soft plastic tail to produce even more action.

And if you share the dream of catching a huge bass, you’ll probably buy at least one of these lures, regardless of the price.