The Secret Crankbait

[Al Agnew]

I thought long and hard about writing this, but by now lots of people know the secret and the guy who swore me to secrecy is long dead, so...

I'd just guided the canoe through a rather difficult riffle when I saw the tackle box, lying on the bottom wedged against a tangle of logs, right where it would have lodged after somebody had trouble in the fast water above. I beached the canoe, stripped, and waded into the 4 feet of strong current, finally reaching a point where I could feel the box with my foot, and then I dipped completely underwater to grab it and came up sputtering. It was a metal tackle box that looked like it had been in the river since the last high water period, a rise of a foot or so a couple weeks back. When I got back to the canoe I opened it. Among the typical assortment of hooks, sinkers, plastic worms, and spinners, there was no means of identifying the owner, but there was a set of eyeglasses in a leather case, a pouch of disintegrating pipe tobacco, and several lures. Two of them were of special interest to me.

At the time, I had been out of high school a year or so. It was in the early 1970s, and the bass tournament craze was just getting into full swing. I belonged to a local bass club, the Pecheur Des Lacs Bassmasters. "Pecheur Des Lacs" was supposedly French for "fisher of lakes", and don't ask me why we named it that--I was one of the founding members and I couldn't tell you. Not only that, but most of us did as much river fishing as lake fishing, and we even held the occasional tournament on Big River.

One of the members was an "old guy"--ancient to a 20 year old, at least--who was well known for catching big smallmouth on the lower portion of Big River. He fished mainly alone on the river, and was rather close-mouthed about how he caught those big smallies. But he'd told us at one time that he caught a lot of them on a "Midge-oreno".

The Midge-oreno, a smaller version of the venerable Bass-oreno, was even then a lure that wasn't easy to find. I'd never used one, but in looking at the pictures in the one catalog I'd found that carried them, I thought it was meant to be a surface lure, with its wooden floating body and scooped out head. I equated it to a Lucky 13, which my dad and I often used to lure big Wappapello Lake bass to the surface.

The two lures in the tackle box were Midge-orenos, sure enough. I vowed to try them at some point, even though I was perfectly happy with my usual surface bait, the Tiny Torpedo, for river smallmouth. Back home, I changed the rusting hooks on them and threw them into my tackle box. And there they sat for a month or two, until the second part of the old-timer's secret came to light. We fished together in a tournament on a local lake, and at one point during the day, I saw his Midges, and they all had skirts on the belly hook. A little later, he tied one on, but he only made a few casts with it. I noted, however, that he was casting it out, letting it sit for a long time before barely twitching it, and then reeling it in steadily.

Now I was curious. Maybe they weren't meant to be surface lures. But a skirt on the BELLY hook? Back in those days I was sensitive about being young and inexperienced and what others thought of me, so I didn't ask him about the lure as I should have. Later, I dug around in my spare lures and found a couple of old spinnerbaits with usable skirts that I could remove and add to those Midges I'd found. And then I had to try them out.

The Bone Hole low-water bridge on Big River was probably one of the most popular spots on the river in the Old Lead Belt area. It was nearly always crowded with swimmers and bank fishermen in the big pool below, and the bridge, a concrete slab with a couple of culverts running through it that were nearly always blocked, formed a dam of sorts that backed water for a half mile upstream, so anglers often put boats in above the bridge and fished up through that pool, then through a short, deep riffle and into another long pool. The area probably saw more fishing pressure than anywhere else on the river. But it was close to home and easy to get to for a couple hours of fishing.

I slid the canoe into the water just above the bridge, tied one of my new-found Midges onto the 12 pound test line on my Shakespeare direct drive casting reel, and made a practice cast in the slack water to watch what the lure did on the retrieve. It wobbled and dove a foot or two deep. Nice, wide wobble, waving the skirt enticingly. It looked pretty good. I decided to make a few casts in the swirling, foaming water at the base of the falls coming over the bridge before getting into the canoe and fishing my way upstream. It only took one cast. The strike came as the lure disappeared, wobbling down into the bubbles, and I caught just a glimpse of a big slab side. The fish was a largemouth. A big largemouth. At least four pounds! I clipped it on a stringer.

A half-dozen more casts below the bridge netted a couple 10 inch smallmouths. I was impressed. I started up the river. I caught two more nice largemouths in the two pound class in the long pool, and then in the deep riffle a huge smallmouth engulfed the lure just as it dove beneath the surface. When I held up the 20 inch, four pound smallie, I was sold on this lure! Two more 16 inchers in the pool above just reinforced my feelings.

I kept a limit of six fish that probably weighed a total of 17 pounds, all in two hours of fishing with that lure--back in those days I wasn't as serious a catch and release angler, and I had to show those fish off. I drove to my best fishing buddy's house and gave him an eyeful, and then I called the old-timer and told him of what I'd caught on his lure.

He said, "Yeah, I've kept quiet about that skirt trick. Without the skirt, you either fish it on top or you have to reel it very slowly to make it work at all, but with the skirt it really wobbles. I've caught more big smallmouth on it than anything else I've ever tried...But I'm going to ask you something. Please, promise me you won't let the secret get out. I wouldn't want everybody in the country to know about it."

I promised him I'd keep his secret as much as possible, but of course whoever fished with me would probably see me using it. He replied, "I know, but if you ever fish with somebody who might publicize it in a magazine or something, make them swear to keep it secret."

I've often wondered since then why he was so adamant about that. Did he think the lure was so effective that once the secret was out it would really harm the big bass population? Did he just want to keep it from his "competition", the other members of the bass club? Or did he plan to maybe one day market the idea somehow himself?

I never found out, but for as long as he was alive I kept the secret. Sure, those who fished with me saw me using it. But in the articles I later wrote for regional outdoor magazines I just called it my secret crankbait. When I fished with an editor of Field and Stream magazine and caught a 21 inch smallmouth on the Meramec, I made him swear not to tell what lure I was using. As the years went by and my reputation as a knowledgeable river smallmouth angler spread and other outdoor writers interviewed me and fished with me, I swore them all to secrecy. One writer, who shall remain nameless here but who is still quite active in the field, went back on his word and mentioned it in an article, but apparently few people paid attention.

Time passed, and I must confess that I enjoyed keeping the secret even after the old-timer passed away. After all, that lure had become one of my absolute best big river smallie baits, and through the years I caught more 18 inch plus bronzebacks on it than on any other lure--and probably used it more than any other as well. Not only did I use it all over the Ozarks, but I caught big fish on it in locales as widespread as the John Day River in Oregon and the St. Regis River in New York.

But the Midge-oreno, as I said, wasn't a popular or easy to find lure, nor did it come in a lot of good colors. In addition, the patent to the lure kept changing hands, and each new company who produced it changed it in one way or another, and seldom for the good. By the 1980s I started making my own. First I made them as close to the Midge pattern as possible, but later I discovered that you didn't have to shape that scooped out front end, but just flatten the front at an angle, and it worked just as good or better. I turned them out on a lathe, using whatever workable wood I could find, and figured out how to shape them off-center on the lathe so that the bellies were flat from front to rear while the backs bowed considerably, a change that probably didn't make them any more effective but pleased my eye. My paint jobs were seldom very elaborate--it might surprise people to know that I get enough of painting fine detail in my artwork, and don't wish to spend a lot of time meticulously painting lures. I've worked out methods with a few colors of enamel in spray cans to produce the three patterns I find effective.

Like I said, I've caught fish on my homemade crankbait on every river I've ever tried. But the first few times I fished the Big Piney, I caught relatively few fish on it even though the conditions seemed perfect. The third or fourth time I floated the Piney, I was being shuttled by another "old-timer" and on the drive to the put-in in his truck, I happened to notice a lure on his dashboard. It was a Baby Lucky 13--with a rubber skirt on the belly hook! I asked him about it and he told me that lots of guys fished them on the Piney. I began to think back...

The mentor who had originally let me in on the secret of the Midge only fished on lower Big River. When I, and a few others, started fishing it on the upper river, it was pure magic for a while, but as a few years went by it got a little less effective. Perhaps those fish were learning to avoid lures with skirts on the belly hook. Perhaps that's why it wasn't quite as effective on the Piney--too many anglers already using it. Perhaps that's why the old-timer didn't want me to spread the word around.

Later, Stacy King and a couple other "famous" tournament anglers from the Ozarks mentioned the Baby Lucky 13 with skirt on the belly hook in articles and even in a couple of talks I happened to attend. So my secret wasn't so secret as I thought. As I found out when I tried it, the Lucky 13 with skirt works very much like the Midge and my homemade version.

As I write this, I can look up on my studio wall and see a group of old lures hanging from an old steel casting rod. Over toward one end is a Midge-oreno with a simple coppery brown with black pattern. It has been painted and repainted several times, and the present paint job is chipped and scarred from bass teeth, but it's obviously one of the old models. In fact, it happens to be one of those two old Midges I found in that tackle box all those years ago, and if it could talk it could tell you of many, many river smallmouth. I'll never know who that old metal tackle box belonged to, but with the eyeglasses and pipe tobacco, I'd like to imagine him as another old-timer, one in a time-line that started with my own dad and grandpa and the love of river fishing they instilled in me--Grandpa has been gone many years, but Dad is still my best partner on the water. It continued with that fishing buddy who learned the rivers and smallmouth with me and who was the first person I wanted to show that stringer of big river fish. Rick died much too young, and I still miss the old days with him. And then there was the "old guy" who later taught me many of the nuances of using his favorite, secret lure. Thanks, Gene, for sharing the secret. It continues with all those through the years who have fished with me and shared the wonderful experience of floating Ozark streams, those who said they learned from me, and those like another Gene, an old Ozark river guide from whom I learned much. Once, when a big smallmouth exploded from the depths of Current River to attack my homemade lure, Gene exclaimed, "That thing came up like a Polaris missile from one o' them atomic submarines."

So, I guess it's time to pass on the "secret". If there is one thing I've learned, it's that there are no magic lures. As another old-timer I know said, "an ounce of biology is worth a ton of tackle". The best lure in the world won't catch many fish if you don't use it with knowledge and care, and even a bad lure will catch fish when a good angler is on the other end of the line.

But just two days ago, on a little nameless creek, the old secret homemade crankbait chalked up another 18 incher.

[Gavin]

Nice write up Al...An old timer who shuttled my wife and I up to Slabtown several years ago was a big fan of the Lucky 13 with a skirt. Wonder if it was the same guy? Forgot his name, but he retired from the Army at Ft. Wood, and he work's out of Rich's.

[creek wader]

Thanks for sharing Al. Knowing and keeping a secrect (that may not be all that secret), for all those yrs. Must of been tough. Well, you know all of us reading this, is dying to try it.

Do you use a full skirt, on something that small?

[Al Agnew]

You just have to experiment. Start out with a full skirt, and if it isn't wobbling very widely it's probably too full. Thin it until it wobbles and waves the skirt nicely. Too thin and it starts getting a very erratic wobble.

[Griffster]

Al, picked up 3 midge oreno's for about 25$ ... good deal?

Cg

Hope all is well... I'm still here kicking around .. fishing less and running with kids more and more...lol Big one leaves June 13th for Univ. of ILL.. one down 3 to go!!!!!

If you ever want to make a run to a game sometime let me know.. I get 4 tickets to every game home and away.