The Formula for Success D.O.A.

Written by David Sikes, Outdoor Writer, Corpus Christi Caller Times | 02 November 2009

the story behind the lure!

Mark Nichols might have followed the ancient path of Antonio Stradivari if Santa hadn’t given his sister a Creepy Crawlers Thing Maker for Christmas. Actually the fate of Nichols, creator and owner of DOA Lures, probably had been determined some time before a craftsman friend gave him a piece of 100-year-old European spruce and encouraged him to carve and polish it into a violin.

The father of this Texas son owned a bait-shrimp trawler, which he kept in Kemah. Every summer and many weekends during the 1960s a young Mark Nichols would visit his father’s canal home on Bolivar Peninsula. When he wasn’t a nighttime deckhand on the 30-foot trawler or helping a friend run crab traps, Nichols was putting around the bay in Dad’s johnboat, fishing. “I thought shrimping was pretty cool back then,” Nichols said. “Even if we had a bad night at least we had enough shrimp for dinner. And we always had bait.”

Nichols got to know shrimp intimately. But he was a lure angler early on. A family friend on Bolivar made lures in his garage. And Dad, who owned a 27-foot Higgins, showed his son how to catch fish with homemade baits. Mattel toy makers probably would have done well to market their Creepy Crawlers machine to wannabe lure makers. Surely Nichols was not the only budding angler who slid a hook into a Creepy Crawler to catch fish. Did you know that a five-pound bass will eat a plastic butterfly?

Nichols discovered this at Lake Austin and nearby creeks after moving to the capital city from Houston, where he had played first base and outfield for the Waltrip High School Rams.

It was during the early 1970s at Austin’s Town Lake where Nichols’ lure-making urge intensified. He began buying liquid plastic by the quart from MF Plastics in Fort Worth.

DOA Shrimp

A friend worked at a tackle shop near the original Schlotzsky’s on Congress Street, where Nichols got into fly fishing. He would buy cheap poppers to catch small bass and bluegill in Town Lake. But when he rigged a three-inch worm with two No. 6 hooks this doubled the size of his fish. Nichols seriously began thinking he could make a better lure around this time. But could he make a living at it?

While attending the University of Texas, Nichols developed woodworking skills remodeling high-end homes in the hills of Austin. It was during this time that he began carving more. In addition to crafting a violin from that piece of European spruce, he also whittled waterfowl from scrap lumber, resurrecting skills he’d learned from his father and grandfather.

But ironically it wasn’t until he moved to the mountains of Durango, Colorado that he carved his first life-sized shrimp. Perhaps this was his way of staying connected to the coast. This original realistic model eventually led to the popular DOA shrimp imitation lure, sold throughout the United States and other parts of the world, including Australia, Brazil, Trinidad and Tobago.

Stream fishing in Colorado also is where Nichols became schooled in fish behavior and fishing finesse. Nichols believes that a better understanding of fish and their prey produces a better fishing lure.

He is a no-nonsense lure maker who has never subscribed to the notion that lures should be designed to catch anglers rather than fish.

He brought this expertise and attitude back to the coast to Stuart, Florida, which became his testing waters. Nichols was a partner in a woodworking shop there in the early 1980s, which allowed him to tinker with the passion that would become his profession. He lived at this shop in the woods for more than a year before upgrading to a travel trailer. Times were hard but he barely noticed.

Big Snook His days were spent inside some of Florida’s finest homes, doing finishing work. At night Nichols carved and created what he believed would become a better fishing lure. In between these tasks, Nichols would scour the streets and shoulders of Stuart for scrap lead that had come off the wheels of cars and trucks. He would melt and mold the lead for his lures.

Bondo provided the material for his early shrimp molds. He used the hollow plastic shafts of Q-Tips to create a channel through the lure for the line and hook. At first he glued the eight tiny shrimp legs individually onto each lure. And he used 300-pound monofilament, melted at the ends with a butane lighter, to create realistic shrimp eyeballs.

“I think I was making about 15 cents an hour back then,” Nichols said about his midnight tackle operation. “I could only make like 50 a night because it took hours for the silicone to cure. Later on I figured out that a couple drops of water cut the curing time to about an hour.” Marketing at the time consisted of schlepping a 30-gallon aquarium to venues such as the Martin County Fair, where Nichols would rent a booth.

The aquarium served as his demonstration pond. Nichols sold 500 imitation shrimp lures from that booth. At $3 each he was in business. “I was sure I’d hit the big time,” he said this past week. “And then I learned about the excise tax.”

Today Nichols is part owner in a small Jacksonville, Florida manufacturing plant where about 95 percent of his lures are made. For the most part he’s resisted the urge to set up shop in China, despite profit-sucking excise taxes imposed on goods made in the USA. DOA headquarters remain in Stuart.

He employs nine folks there and the Jacksonville staff fluctuates between four and seven, depending on production. The staff in Stuart has Fridays off. It should come as no surprise that Nichols doesn’t go to the office every day. He averages four days on the water each week in summer and three in winter. Personal research and development is his therapy as well as his business edge.