Andy Poss Can’ t Catch a Break
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FOR THE RECORD
Contrary to popular belief, not everyone who deserves it gets 15 minutes of fame. Relatively speaking, Andy Poss only got about 13 minutes’ worth.
You remember him. He’ s the guy who introduced the Alabama Rig to the bass fishing world in 2011. Its acceptance among anglers was tentative at first, but then it exploded over the tournament landscape like a rocket. First, Paul Elias used one of Poss’ contraptions in an FLW Tour stop at Guntersville to catch a four-day limit of 102 pounds, 8 ounces and win by more than 17 pounds over Robert Behrle. A month later, Dan Morehead tied on an Alabama Rig and caught a 61-4 fourday sack at Kentucky Lake to claim the Costa FLW Series Championship.
Morehead’ s win at Kentucky Lake was the capper, the event that turned interest in the Alabama Rig into a mad rush. Poss had a deal with Mann’ s Bait Company to market the rig, and for a while the money was rolling in. Then two things happened, though not at once. First, seemingly every tackle company
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Andy Poss Can’ t Catch a Break
that marketed bass baits began to knock off the rig, which is standard operating procedure in the lure business. Then, the two major tournament organizations, FLW and B. A. S. S., banned the rig from their pro circuits.
Poss couldn’ t do anything about the bans, and to a certain extent he couldn’ t do anything about the knockoffs. The latter is what really hurt, but uniqueness is a rare commodity in the fishing world. Though there are dozens of soft-plastic stick baits that more or less look like the Yamamoto Senko, out on the water they’ re not a Yamamoto Senko.
The real problem for the Alabama entrepreneur is that variations on his theme worked, even the rigs fabricated by guys hunkered down over their garage workbenches. Depending on where and when they were fished, the knockoffs caught bass – sometimes lots of them. There were rigs with all sorts of spinner blades and wire arms that were shorter, longer, thicker or thinner than the Alabama Rig’ s wire arms, and rigs with heads of different shapes and sizes. The name was
trademarked, but even that wasn’ t bulletproof as fishermen still use the A- word to describe any version of a castable umbrella rig.
The design of the original Alabama Rig is patented, too, though it didn’ t seem to matter much, either. Poss is still hoping for a beefier utility patent, which would provide more protection for his castable umbrella rig, but it’ s been held up in Washington, D. C., where the wheels of the U. S. Patent and Trademark Office turn exceedingly slow. Poss has spent tens of thousands of dollars trying to stop the bleeding through cease-anddesist orders. Though his deal with Mann’ s has gone away, he still sells the Alabama Rig through Tim Horton’ s profoundoutdoors. com website.
“ The lawyers are still very optimistic,” notes Poss.“ We did what the lawyers and big-business people said, but everybody knocked it off so quickly. We notified companies in 2012 that we had a design patent, and if the utility patent is granted, every single one of them making rigs that copy the Alabama Rig will be infringing on it.
“ We are on 6- and 12-month intervals now with reports from the patent office. Usually it takes no longer than 8 to 12 months to get a patent,” Poss continues.“ The process for us has been roughly 36 months. They want us to jump through hoops if we make any little change. I’ m having a hard time choking this all down.”
Poss’ wife, Tammy, says her husband got the idea for the Alabama Rig from a TV mini-series called The Blue Planet. In one episode, predatory fish were shown chasing baitfish. Poss noticed that as long as the baitfish stayed in a massive school, they seemed to confuse and confound the tuna chasing them. Once a few baitfish broke away from the pack, however, tuna went after them and scooped them up.
Poss, who once gathered and sold mussels in the Tennessee River chain of lakes for a living, wondered if Pickwick Lake’ s bass would behave in the same fashion when a small school of shad raced away in front of them. Sure they would, and even if the umbrella rig was already in existence and widely used to troll for inshore saltwater fish and stripers, apparently nobody ever considered that it might be just as effective for bass.
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FLWFISHING. COM I juLy 2017