i love the ‘ 8os ( and early ‘ 90s )
In this first edition I ’ ll start with a few industry shakers from the late 80s into the early 90s .
Before I start this trip down Must-Have Avenue , though , here ’ s an interesting consideration : We likely would have never known these lures existed if it were not for tournament trails , tournament anglers and the intensive sport of competitive angling . Each year , there are hundreds of tournaments fished by thousands of anglers who make millions of casts . Without so many data points creating tournament results , we would never know exactly how potent one lure can be in comparison to the others . And over the last 30 years , I could have never guessed some of these lures would have been top producers .
So let ’ s take a ride …
Lunker City Slug-Go
I ’ ll start with the Lunker City Slug-Go because they were the first lures I ever hoarded – as in , lurked in the tackle store , stalked the delivery man and bought almost every bag he had on the truck . If you wonder what drives someone to do such despicable things as to buy up all the lures of a particular brand from a tackle store , this is how it begins .
I ’ m not sure of the year , but it had to be the late 80s because I was still in high school and couldn ’ t drive yet . I had a friend who loved to fish as much as I did , and he could drive us to nearby lakes and ponds . We would walk pond banks or scull around in our co-owned Tupperware pond-hopper pontoon boat that someone gave us because it leaked so bad . We both had tackleboxes full of standard-issue Florida lures . And we never caught jack . Nothing to speak of anyway . We called one of the ponds we frequented “ Lake Barren ” because we never caught bass there .
One day , a kid at school whose dad was in the local bass club told us we needed to buy some Slug-Gos . We didn ’ t even know what Slug-Gos were , so we went to the local tackle shop to find out . They were sold out ( imagine that ) except for two bags in an ugly red shad color . The shop owner also offered us some kind of special “ offset ” hooks to make them work . To be honest , once I got my first Slug-Go rigged up , it looked terrible : a red plastic stick on a hook – no freaking way this was going to work .
You know how this story ends , so I won ’ t bore you with the fish-by-fish details . But after just one hour , the bottom of the Tupperware boat was littered with 20 broken , shredded , red shad plastic sticks . We had just caught the most bass we had ever caught in our life from Lake Barren . And when all the life was chewed out of the ugly red shad sticks , the pond went dead again . We went back to our standard lures and never got another bite .
We called one of the ponds we frequented “ Lake Barren ” because we never caught bass there .
The Slug-Go taught me early on the sobering fact that bass were put on the earth for the sole purpose of monkeywrenching humans ’ brains . How could we make three previous trips to a pond full of bass , throw every lure we had in at them , never get a bite , then cast featureless plastic sticks and every bass in the lake would fight over it ?
For the next two weeks we stalked the tackle shop every day and finally caught the delivery man in the act restocking Slug-Gos . We bought most of his entire delivery in every color he had . Once the Slug-Gos were hoarded , we skipped a lot of school and caught a lot of bass in places we thought fish never even lived .
58 MAJORLEAGUEFISHING . COM | APRIL-MAY 2023