Over this winter, my friend Anthony and I took a ‘deep dive’ approach to recreating the iconic Banana Plug. If you don’t know that that is, it’s a legendary lure designed by a legendary Long Island surfcaster named Jack Frech. The story behind it is interesting on its own; supposedly Jack was fishing a rock off of Montauk Point deep in the night. The waters were teeming with bunker and the bass were so well-fed and surrounded by millions of potential targets that they would not eat a plug. Then, a boat entered the scene, wielding live bunker, the men caught several exceptional specimens while Jack continued to flail and fail from the rocks.
Jack went home dejected, but inspired and set his mind to creating a plug that could draw strikes among the masses of menhaden. Failure after failure followed as plugs carved to look like bunker were just too hard to get swim like the real thing! The “eureka moment” came when a sheet of paper fell across a drawing of a bunker that Jack was using for inspiration. The sheet of paper obscured the top half of the drawing giving way to a new concept; an effective bunker shape could be just half of that classic, deep-bodied baitfish, and still look like the real thing from below! With some tweaking the Banana Plug was born and its design was revealed on the pages of this very magazine some 40-plus years ago.
Legend has it that Jack left a few secrets out of the published version of the design – the one released to the public would work, but wasn’t that perfect balance that gave him a true edge. This is why Anthony and I dug deep and made a bunch of them to dial in the action that we thought looked and swam like the real thing. The results have been quite encouraging and some really nice fish have fallen for this hybridized version of Frech’s brainchild.
Last week, I landed on a ferocious Banana bite, landing a pile of nice fish in a couple hours. As the bite cooled off, I began moving around to see if I could get back on the fish, then I started experimenting with other plugs to see if I could reignite the bite. The Banana is big and bulky and doesn’t fit perfectly in a plug bag tube, so I got lazy and laid one on top of the tubes while I tried a pencil popper. Several casts later, I decided to put the Banana back on, but when I opened my bag, it was gone!
In a slight state of panic, I began checking the water all around me, checking to see if it was hooked on my waders, belt or lanyards… gone! Scanning the shoreline, rechecking my bag… gone! I was out a good 60 feet from shore and looking back at the rocky shoreline that was about the same colors as the bunker-hued ‘nanner’ I had dropped, I wondered if I even would have a chance at recovering it.
Just before I stepped out of my boot prints to go on a focused search, I got an idea. Ripping open my bag, I grabbed a second Banana and dropped it into the water at my waders. A stiff northwest breeze blew along the shore while a swirling incoming tide pushed in the other. The plug floated off in an odd direction, seeming to defy the current in favor of the wind, but cutting across the current at a weird angle. Like Elmer Fudd following breadcrumbs to a Bugs Bunny trap, I followed the plug into inches of water, and then, looking ahead about 10 feet, I saw my bunker-colored Banana bobbing against the cobble shoreline. It had drifted 150 feet away in a direction I would not have expected. It takes a lot of work and time to shape, build and paint one of these plugs and it’s impossible to recreate the mojo of one that’s been doing the work and landing the fish! Reunited, and it feels so good.
