In the fall of 1981 I caught my first Steelhead on the Yachats River. Little did I know that it was the beginning of a twenty year fun filled business.
My wife Carol, our son Rick, our Cocker Spaniel Rusty and I had moved to the Oregon coast the year before, and despite taking a Steelhead fishing class taught by Dr. Howard Horton at the Marine Science Center and on the Siletz River, we still hadn't caught one. It wasn't from a lack of trying, we spent many hours casting and retrieving various lures and drifting globs of smelly salmon eggs through the deep holes on the Yachats, Ten Mile and Alsea Rivers.
I had left Carol to fish at what we called “The Big Hole” about three miles up from the Yachats rivers mouth, and walked downstream with Rusty. I had bought a green and gold spinner at True Value and I was anxious to try something a little different from the Mepps and Rooster Tails I usually used.
At a bend in the river overhung by Alder trees, Rusty and I slid down a muddy bank and I made my first cast. The spinner sparkled and flashed in the fast moving current and then disappeared. I suddenly realized that I had a fish on!
Boy, did I have a fish on! After a splashing jump right in front of us, the silvery bright Steelhead headed downstream making my reel scream and Rusty bark. There was no way to follow it because of the overhanging trees and brush, so all I could do was hang on and pray. When it reached the next bend in the river it stopped and started jumping and thrashing. Rusty was still barking, up to his chest in the water trying to decide if he could swim down stream and help. He was a great swimmer and if I hadn't called him back he probably would have tried.
I started pumping and reeling, and after about fifteen minutes I had the fish back in front of us. Our net was back at the big hole with Carol so my plan was to slide the fish through a shallow backwash and up onto the bank. Things were looking good until Rusty couldn't contain himself and tried to jump on what we both thought was a tired fish. Rejuvenated, the Steelie raced back down stream toward the Ocean, stopping again at the same place and jumping to show his defiance. For the second time I had to call Rusty back out of the water.
Three times I had to crank that fish back up stream and when I finally slid it into the shallow backwash, it started flopping and splashing, turning the once clear water into a muddy soup. I threw my rod down and Rusty and I jumped on the writhing fish. It was an epic struggle, I lost my grip on the slippery, mud coated Steelhead several times but with Rusty's help I finally slid the muddy fish up onto the bank and conked it, on what I hoped was its head, with a rock. I washed the Steelie off in clear water and hung him from a broken limb in an Alder while I tried to make Rusty and I presentable, or at least recognizable.
Carol, hearing the barking and yelling, had started down stream to see what all the commotion was about. She stopped in her tracks when she saw her wet, slimy, bedraggled husband and a muddy, dripping dog walking toward her. “What happened to you two?” she yelled.
When I saw her, I raised the fish with a flourish and a Ta Da! She was almost as excited as Rusty and I, and later we drove into Yachats to show the eight pound Steelhead to everyone we knew and some we didn't.
I went back to True Value hardware and bought some more of the green and gold spinners. They had a heavy brass body that made them sink quickly and get down to where the fish were, but they weren't cheap, and they were always hanging up on snags and rocks. Usually we would break our line trying to get them free, so even though we were starting to catch fish, replacing lures was turning into a big expense.
One evening while I was going through our gear, I looked at one of the green spinners. “I bet we could make something like this ourselves, and it sure would be a lot cheaper!”
The next day we visited a tackle shop in the little coastal town of Seal Rock and were surprised to find that they carried almost all of the components we would need. With a little innovation and model paint we could build our own green and gold spinners.
The fishing tin the 1980's was good, and we were catching Coho and Chinook Salmon, along with Steelhead and even some Calico, or Dog Salmon from the Necanicum River near Seaside. Our lure making was evolving, we discovered prism tape and ¼ inch lead wire for the spinner bodies, and we started putting a stripe of prism tape on the blades to make them even flashier.
We kept experimenting and improving our spinners, trying out different colors and sizes and giving them to friends to try, asking for feed back. Just for fun, I cut a lightning bolt out of a scrap of prism tape and stuck it on the blade. I showed it to Carol and said, “Hey, we could call them Lightning Strike Spinners, and use a lightning bolt for a logo.” I don't know how many lightning bolts I cut out with an Exacto knife, but I know it was a lot, because we started selling spinners, first in a little sporting goods store in Yachats, then when Jack Green, a friend of ours who lived in Seaside, got them in 12th avenue grocery next to a fishing bridge over the Necanicum River, we were hard pressed to keep up with the orders.
Finally, we found out that the wholesale tape company where we got our prism tape would make a die to stamp out the lightning bolts for us. That really sped things up, and by then we were selling enough that with a little bit of fibbing about how big we were, we could get the wholesale wire, lead, hook, and blade manufacturers to sell to us. We could buy our components by the thousand instead of in small, more expensive quantities.
We tried every color and pattern of prism tape we could find, and of course we tested them on the local streams and found out which combination of color and size caught fish. When we encountered other fishermen we'd hand out free lures, and we traveled up and down the coast selling them to hardware, sporting goods and convenience stores. We always took our fishing gear along with us.
By the early 1990's we were selling several thousand spinners every fall. Almost all of our sales took place in September, October and November. We had narrowed our selection down to the most popular colors and sizes by then and we would start making them in the summer trying to anticipate which of the five colors and three sizes would sell the best that fall. One year, early in September, the first Salmon caught in Alsea Bay was caught on one of our florescent orange #5 spinners. The local stores sold out immediately and we were getting phone calls in the middle of the night asking if we had any. We gladly sold to people who visited our shop and we made a lot of friends that way. A young man by the name of Martin Link stopped by to buy some lures and later he sent us a picture from Venezuela of him holding a Snook he caught on one of our spinners. One fisherman asked if I would put our lightning bolts on his Mepps spinners, as he was convinced that there was something magical about the lightning bolt that Salmon couldn't resist.
The sporting goods stores, truck stops and convenience stores in Seaside were always our best customers. Our lures were the local favorites, and you could always find them hanging from the power lines that crossed the river over the fishing bridges. One time we drove our pickup and camper up the coast to Seaside and camped next to the river. The next morning while we were eating breakfast we looked out the window to see a fisherman fighting a fish. We helped him land a nice Chinook and we were pleasantly surprised to see that he was using one of our lures. I took his picture holding up his fish and later we had it framed and took it back up to him. There's a story told to me by Jennie Logsdon-Martin of I fish.net, about her using a Lightning Strike spinner in Seaside. While she was walking to the river to fish, she found a piece of pink ribbon on the ground. She picked it up and on a whim, tied it to the hook on her lure. Needless to say she caught a big Chinook and the next day almost everyone was using a piece of pink ribbon tied on a Lightning Strike spinner.
Link's sporting goods store in Seaside surprised us one August with an order for a thousand of our lures. He was smart to order a month or so ahead of time, because it took us two weeks to crank them out. We learned a lot about building lures and packaging, filling that order. Carol did all of the packaging and she was constantly improving their appearance and convenience. We started with a yellow card stock with our logo printed on it and four holes; one to hang it up with and the other three to tie the top of the lure and the treble hook down with. Unfortunately this left one hook sticking straight out, and when a kid at the Newport Fred Meyers caught his sweater on one of them and yanked the whole display over, we had to start gluing a plastic cover over the lure. Eventually we found a plastic clam shell that fit our spinners like a glove, and later we printed our own display cards on the computer printer.
When the computer age came along we drug our feet for a while, but finally my brother talked us into buying one. It wasn't long before we were doing inventory, spreadsheets, fliers, price lists and a host of other things including starting up a web site. It was quite a learning process but we did it all ourselves, using Go Daddy as a host, we registered “lightningstrikelures.com.” We had a gallery of big fish pictures and I even created an animated Lightning Strike spinner. We didn't use PayPal or accept credit cards, we just had a list of the sizes and colors, a printable order sheet, and basically said, “You send us a filled out order sheet with a check and we'll send you the lures.” We never got a rubber check and we never failed to fill an order, some of which came from all over the world.
Over the twenty years or so that we sold those lures, averaging from 2,000 to 5,000 every fall, Carol assembled every package and I hand made every lure. Eventually my fingers began losing their dexterity and we decided to sell Lightning Strike. Carol phoned Jim Brien, who owns a salmon egg bait company in Seaside to ask if he'd be interested, and he was. A few days later after a handshake, Lightning Strike Lures was his.
