Adapted from the December 1998 Issue of On The Water Magazine.
The New England chapter of the Red Gill story began 50 years ago when David Dowcra, a British casting champion, visited Cape Cod and left his host with nine toy-like pieces of plastic that resembled sea serpents. He said they were popular “back yon.”
C’mon. Red Gills are goofy-looking artificials, plastic snakes that resemble nothing else in common use. They come without hooks and are nearly weightless. Dowcra’s host would have been justified rolling the lures in catnip and tossing them to his tabby.
Fortunately, Dowcra’s host was surfcaster Frank Daignault, author and seminar speaker whose addiction to striped bass always had him searching for a new fix. Daignault thought the lures might imitate sand eels, the slender forage fish that frequent New England waters. Snakes look a bit like eels, right?
One night in the mid-1970s, after making sure nobody was watching, Daignault threaded a hook through the hollow body of a Red Gill and rigged it as a teaser. And when he started lobbing this strange rig into the Cape Cod surf he found he could barely hold onto his rod!
In the small world of New England surfcasting, Daignault had discovered a pioneering way to fool striped bass. So, he did what you or I might do…he kept quiet.
“When you’re casting the best plug you own, and you catch fifteen fish, fourteen of them on the Red Gill, you start to think you have a secret weapon,” Daignault told me, his voice dropping, conspiratorially. “I mean, these things are really that good.”
In time. Daignault tracked down the Red Gill inventor and manufacturer, Alexander J. Ingram, and obtained a lifetime supply to augment what was left of his original nine. Red Gills quietly became a part of his arsenal, right there with the Rebel plug, the Smiling Bill jig, and the ever-productive live eel. Then something happened that helped the rest of us out: Daignault lost a few of his lures on the beach. Another surfcaster found them tumbling in the suds. The Red Gill secret was out.
In a few quick seasons, Red Gills became one of the great weapons hurled over the New England froth. Bass clubs began talking about them at winter meetings. Blue Fox Tackle Company of Minnesota began importing them. Tackle shops started stocking them. Back then, Daignault recalls, Red Gills seemed bound to take their place among the rarified company of groundbreaking lures.
What’s more, anglers were finding other uses for the miniature British sea serpents: the tiny 2 1/2-inch Red Gill worked wonders during worm hatches; the full-sized, 6 1/2- and 8-inch sizes were solid performers offshore with diamond jigs for cod and pollock; and any of the larger sizes could be trolled as singles or on umbrella rigs for bass, blues, and small tuna. Just about everybody found a way to work them into the fishing. Their place in the tackle bag seemed secure. But a funny thing happened on the way to big beach immortality. Striped bass stocks crashed. And with fewer people prowling the night sand, Red Gill sales slumped. Simultaneously, Daignault’s discovery became threatened by less expensive imitations like RagLou and Eddy Stone Sand Eels. Blue Fox stopped importing the originals, and the imitations replaced them on tackle store shelves. In retrospect, Blue Fox’s rationale was simple: the demand for Red Gills might seem large to people inside the surfcasting cult, but in the big picture of national lure sales, it was insignificant.
All of this leads to today’s strange cir-cumstance: bass are back; Red Gills aren’t. And the few that remain have become something akin to contraband. “I wish we still had them,” a Blue Fox rep told me. “Everywhere I go, people ask about them.” So how do you get some? Three ways.
First, scour the local tackle shops. A few remainders turn up, on rare occasions, around New England, mostly in shops where the owner bought bulk bags when the importing ended. For instance, one of the last inventories is at River’s End Tackle, in Old Saybrook, Connecti-cut, where owner Pat Abate hoarded them a few years back. “When we knew they were going out of circulation, we bought up the stock off any wholesaler who had them,” Abate said. “We figured people would be begging for them after a while.” If you can’t find them in a tackle shop, you can try to order directly from Blue Fox. I was able to get the company to sell me a few bags of 6 1/2-inch Red Gills last winter, but the favored 4 1/2-inch size was sold out, and color selection was lim-ited. The third way to get them would be to order them from British tackle stores, which can be located on the Internet. This will give you the best shot at getting a choice range of size and colors. (English tackle stores sell four sizes – 70, 115, 178 and 210 millimeters – and in colors that have yet to be seen on this side of the Atlantic, including such enticing prospects as Blue Pearl, Ice Fizz, Green Reaper and Mackerel.)
The news on the manufacturing and importing front is that to this day the original Red Gills are still made in the cool, misty fishing village of Mevagissey, U.K., and sold – wholesale only – out of a company headquarters that the owners describe as “a garden shed.” Brits, it seems, faithfully use them for wreck fishing, dunking them into the depths from boats anchored over cod grounds. They also cast them to pollock and a few British bass.
Intrepid British anglers even travel the globe with them, duping such gamefish as Pacific jacks and Caribbean grouper.
As for their prospects of returning to New England, the crystal ball offers a mixed report. It turns out that 1998 is the 30-year anniversary of the Red Gill line, prompting the part-time Red Gill company to begin a marketing push, with new packaging and labels. Marilyn Ingram, daughter-in-law of the late Alexander Ingram (d. 1983), told me she was cheered to hear that Yanks still cast Red Gills for stripers.
Editor’s Note: Red Gills are once again widely available, with some available in tackle shops throughout New England along with the ability to buy them directly from the company at RedGill.Co.Uk
