For most of us though it's a gradual process, where you work the nerve up to try a lure just a bit larger than you're accustomed to using, and you get a fish just that much larger than you usually catch. And so it goes, until you find yourself caught up in this peculiar madness where your fishing buddies are falling down laughing at you for going out on pretty little trout lakes with a box full of tuna and marlin baits.

Maybe that's why I have so few fishing buddies; big lures not only scare away small fish, but also small fishermen. Or maybe it's just my personal hygiene combined with the scent of salmon-egg oil. Either way, I found myself out on a productive lake this spring, with a client who wanted to learn how to catch the big ones. As most of my bookings come from those who read my articles and contact me by Email, I have the luxury of taking out people who know a little about me, know something about what to expect on the water, and realize the limits of what I can do for them.

So when this gentleman wrote to me and specifically requested a trip for big brown trout, I told him I myself had never caught a brown over ten pounds, but that I could probably help him out with the five-pounders. Long story short, he agreed and we fished together, catching some browns in the two to four pound class. A little shy of the braggart's mark I had set, but the client was happy, and in that our fish were caught on large Rapala plugs of a certain size and pattern he did not have, he asked me to sell him the hot lure of the day. After much fish-market haggling, we agreed on a barter, where he ended up with the customized Rapala and I went home with an honest-to-goodness, thirty-dollar, handmade, autographed AC plug in my tackle box.

If you're primarily familiar with catching trout on garden-worms, you may not have heard of the AC, but any west-coast angler dedicated to the pursuit of monster trout in lakes will tell you that this lure is a legend. The war stories could fill a book, but for the layman let me just point out that the Oregon state record for brown trout was broken last October by an AC aficionado named Ron Lane, who caught a 28.5 pound brown on a seven-inch AC minnow, the very same model I had acquired.

For several weeks I tried to work up my confidence to use this gigantic lure- I would take it out of my tackle box, turning it over in my hands and marveling at the hand-carved craftsmanship, yet when it came time to use it, I couldn't quite reconcile my image of the AC as a valuable collector's item that should be stored in a display case with my experience that a fishing lure is simply a tool, one that should be driven into the weeds, mud, sticks and rocks, and lost forever on the bottom of a lake if that's what is needed to catch fish.

"It's just not the right time." I told myself as I caught brown trout on four-inch minnows at Lake Tahoe. "Not yet." I thought as I hooked mackinaw on five-inch plugs at Silver Lake, but when I finished fishing Silver recently and drove past nearby Caples Lake on my way home, noticing that the ice was finally breaking up on the lake's surface, a strange feeling came over me- "That's where I'm going to use the AC plug!"

Though I've always been happy to fish big lakes for big trout in my canoe, when I mentioned the ice-out at Caples to my friend Aaron Fox of Backwater Charters (530-544-1977), he offered to take me in his brand new boat, a 16 foot Lund with Scotty electric downriggers. "Sounds good!" I said, "But how early can we launch? I'm pretty obsessive about getting out for dawn patrol, you know."

"I called the resort, and they have an answering machine message that says they open the boat ramp at seven, but would probably be going to six on the weekend." Aaron replied. Would probably? To me, these are bankers' hours, but I couldn't pass up the opportunity to fish from such a luxurious vessel, so I told him to pick me up at five-thirty a.m. on Sunday, June eighth.

This would have us arriving at the lake by six-thirty, a half-hour early if the ramp opened at seven, a half-hour late if in fact they had moved the opening ahead to six. Close enough, I figured. As we drove from Tahoe, we swapped tales of past catches at Caples and held a friendly debate over what part of the lake to fish first and what techniques to employ when we arrived.

But just as we pulled into the entrance to Caples Lake Resort and our anticipation reached fever pitch, the dreams of big fish dissolved, replaced by a nightmare vision; a huge, yellow, construction loader vehicle parked right in front of the ramp! What the hell? There was another would-be angler with a trailered boat ahead of us, so we climbed out of Aaron's truck to ask him if he knew what was going on. "John's a little mad." said the man, who then went on to explain that at some point before the current starting launch time at the ramp, somebody 'poached' it by cutting, breaking, or simply unhooking the chain across the entrance; he wasn't sure which. After the poacher went out, three other guys saw that the ramp was open and launched their boats as well. So John, the manager of the resort, had called the sheriff and blocked the ramp to trap the perpetrator, seal off the crime scene, and perhaps allow detectives to dust the chain for prints before the chain of evidence was also broken.

As a man with a red face and spittle in the corners of his mouth stomped forward, we realized that the fellow we were speaking with had made a kind understatement in describing John as "a little mad", unless he meant mad as in crazy. Mad John barked at us to move our vehicle in order to make way for authorities, who he said would probably be at least an hour in coming, then 'suggested' that we just go to Silver Lake.

"Alrighty then. Let's do that." I told Aaron, so we drove another seven miles to Silver, where I once again lost the nerve to use my beloved AC plug. The folks at Silver Lake at least have the sense to allow people to launch at any hour and pay on the way out, and we did catch and release a five-pound mackinaw on a puny five-and-a-half inch lure. As we left we talked to another boater, who told us he had been one of the early launchers on Caples. He said he saw the chain down at the ramp and figured it was a self-launch deal like at Silver, but just as he started fishing, the sheriff came up in a rental boat from the resort and ordered him back to the ramp along with the other three suspects. When questioned on shore, each boater told the same story, that the chain was already down when he launched. So Mad John, like a teacher who punishes the whole class when the spitball shooter won't 'fess up, banned all four of them from the boat ramp for life!

What does this have to do with fishing? Nothing, so let's move on to the morning of Wednesday, June eleventh, when Aaron and I carried my canoe and gear down Caples Lake Dam in full darkness at 4:30, avoiding the new fifteen-dollar launch fee, the release from liability form, and any possibility of another ramp-nazi scene. After pushing off we headed West past the resort, then started trolling tight to the shoreline. Aaron was pulling a Rapala Jointed, but with a huge tacklebox full of lures at my disposal, I knew that for me there was only one option. Yes! Finally! The AC Minnow! I tied it to eight-pound-test line on a spinning outfit and lowered it into the water while moving forward with my electric motor at medium-speed. Wow! The plug's diving lip pulled it beneath the surface, and if I hadn't just tied it on myself, I would have sworn that a wounded rainbow trout was swimming along beside the canoe! The wide wiggle of its jointed body made it look even bigger than seven inches, and I had to fight to banish second thoughts from my mind. I let out 100 yards of line then closed my reel's bail, checked the drag, and picked up the pace to a fast-troll, three to four miles per hour. Traveling in less than fifteen feet of water, I held the rod in my hand and swept it back and forth to impart an irregular, darting action to the lure.

Barely ten minutes had passed and just as the old doubts about the probability of a fish striking the huge lure began to cloud my concentration, my rod bent over hard. "Hey, I think I hooked the bottom. No, it's coming with us...I must be pulling a log...or..." Then the rod, which had been bowed into a deep but motionless arc, began to throb and pulse heavily, unmistakably. "No, no, it's not a log, it's a BIG, LOAGEY FISH!" (Loagey: adjective- My made-up word for a powerful trout, often just after ice-out, that is slow to react and at first may be mistaken for a log.) I directed Aaron to reel in as fast as possible while I moved the motor's tiller with my elbow to steer away from shore, toward the relative safety of deep water. The fish stayed down for perhaps five minutes, peeling line from my reel's drag in a slow, deliberate fashion, then it suddenly shot straight to the surface right next to the canoe as I struggled to reel fast enough to keep the line tight. "Big mackinaw!" yelled Aaron, and he was right. This fish was easily over ten pounds, and was no longer loagey at all. It splashed us and dove back down a few feet, where we watched it roll and twist furiously. Then it sounded for the bottom again, this time at a lightning-fast pace. I spent another ten minutes working it back up; each time I had it close enough to see, it seemed to see us as well, and would writhe and dart from side to side then dive back down. When it finally circled close enough to the canoe and the surface for Aaron to slip my long-handled net beneath it, he lifted it up in one deft movement that had me thanking God for the foresight to bring along a net-man who spent four years as a Tahoe charter captain!

I measured it as between 33 and 34 inches in length, and net-man took some photos while I held it up with the AC plug still hanging from its mouth. Aaron remarked that it looked like a big muskellunge with its silvery coloration and fierce, elongated jaw. The comparison hit home when I foolishly tried to remove the hooks by hand rather than using pliers. I pried open its mouth, separating interlocking rows of sharp, curved teeth, and when the fish reacted with a vicious, convulsive head-shake, I received several deep, slashing cuts to my thumb.

Then I did something quite out of character, placing the male mackinaw that weighed at least 15 pounds back into the lake. "I hope those photos come out." I said as I pushed it forward then pulled it back in the water to flare its gills and revive it. This proved unnecessary when after a few seconds it squirted out of my hands with a powerful kick of its tail, then swam slowly down and out of sight. I just sat there for a moment, shivering with adrenaline and the cold, before I snapped out of my fish-induced stupor to holler "Yeeeeah!" and do that Tiger Woods fist-pump-in-the-air thing. It was just after sunrise and we were across the lake from the marina, where we could see the first trailered boats arriving. I heard an angry male voice coming from the same direction; must be Mad John using his customer service skills, I thought.

We fished for another six hours without a bite, with Aaron trying a variety of lures while I grinned like an idiot and refused to use anything but the AC. When I got home, I just had to thank the man who made my catch possible, the lure's designer and manufacturer, Allan Cole. I went online to his website, acplugs.com, and Emailed him. He wrote me back promptly and gave me positive feedback, asking for a photo of my first fish on his lure.

From his written comments, I could just tell he'd be a blast to talk fishing with, so I gave him a call. We talked about a lot of things, including the many records set by anglers using AC's for a variety of species, and how he first came to make the unique lure. He told me that he originally developed it for striped bass, then found it to be highly effective for huge largemouth bass, and after that went on to use it for trout. He was cordial and funny as he tried to answer all my questions while I peppered him with new ones, and before I let him go, I made him tell me the story of his biggest brown trout ever, which after 36 years of trying, he caught just last month! He was fishing Lake Paulina on May 29 when a thunderstorm and accompanying wind drove him and his fishing companion off the water. When the wind died down, they went back out in their small aluminum boat under a sky still overcast and drizzling rain. Allan was trolling his AC Minnow when he hooked a fish that at first felt somewhat small to him, maybe seven pounds. Don't you just love that, a 'small' seven-pound brown! Anyway, as the fight dragged on and he caught a glimpse of his opponent, he realized it was well over ten pounds. When he finally brought it close enough to be netted, it broke through the bottom of the old, sun-baked mesh and started to swim away, pulling the line through the hole after it! Allan's friend was also quite a net-man, because he lunged forward and hand-grabbed the fish, dragging it into the boat! It weighed 26.6 pounds on a certified scale, the fifth largest brown trout ever caught on the West Coast. Allan was kind enough to send me photos to use for this article, and his fish looks like it could just about eat my Caples Lake mackinaw. There are several variations of the AC, and all of them work. The cut-plug style AC is available through Luhr Jensen and can be found in well-stocked tackle stores, but the AC Minnow and several other models can only be ordered from Allan directly, through his website. The price of the lures reflects the time and effort it takes to make each one by hand, and you know Allan is a straight-up guy, because when I asked him to share a tip for using the AC that I could give to Fish Sniffer readers, he recommended that if you purchase his lure, you also get one of the lure-retrieval devices available from Cabela's and Bass Pro Shops. With one of these, he tells me he gets four out of five snagged lures back. He also admonished anglers who hope to catch a trophy to make sure the net is up to the job! Thanks Allan!

Until next time,
Mark (The Trout Whisperer) Wiza
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