The Ranger
The Robert’s Ranger is a very simplistic-looking yet unique topwater fishing lure that has been around for more than 40 years. It’s kind of a goofy looking, torpedo-shaped lure with a simple paint job. The Ranger lure has two characteristics unique to its design. One is “castabilty.” There is no other topwater lure that casts
like it. With an 11 foot spinning outfit with 15 pound mono or 50 pound braided line, I can throw a three ounce version 120 yards. That’s 360 feet. More if you have the wind to your back. One time, twenty some years ago, I was at G. Loomis in Woodland, Washington in their parking lot testing a new 13 foot surf/shore fishing rod they were making. I tossed one of these Rangers (hookless) across the lot. It went past their large building and wrapped over a power line next door and I had to snap it off before running back in to the building before anyone saw us. It had to be a 400 foot cast. The lure may still be hanging there.
The other feature is its movement in the water. Once the lure hits the water you start cranking it in, keeping it on the surface. It flops about with no particular pattern and when you first use one you can’t believe that any fish would hit it. But they do!! In fact, they go crazy for it. It is hands down the best surf/shore fishing lure I have ever seen for Roosterfish, Jacks, and Trevallies. Offshore I’ve caught many Dorado (Mahi, Dolphinfish) with them,
even several from shore. I’ve had sharks attack them (usually nipping them off) and even Sailfish and Striped Marlin chase them.
For decades, even to this day, many people think that I invented it or at least was the owner of the Ranger lure. What follows is the story of this amazing fishing lure creation and my involvement with it. I think it’s an interesting story, if nothing else I get to vent here somewhat. I won’t blame you for skipping past this section. Anyway …
Back in late 1991 I was contemplating opening my first small tackle shop in Cabo San Lucas. I had bought a bunch of molds and materials from a guy who had been making offshore trolling lures for his friends and started dabbling in making them myself. I wasn’t very good at it early on and even though I was catching lots of fish in the surf with my Klassic Popper, I wasn’t sure I could sustain a tackle shop with just my own creations. Then fate brought me upon a person who changed my life forever.
One afternoon I was working my way up Pedregal Beach on the Pacific-side of Cabo, casting my poppers as well as assorted Krocodile spoons towards schooling Jacks. I wasn’t catching anything to speak of; the bigger fish were all outside of my casting range. I was frustrated after a while and plunked my butt down on the beach to watch the feeding fish, when a little old man came up from behind me carrying a surf/shore fishing rod. He asked how I had done so far and I told him not to bother wasting his time, that the fish were too far out. He just smiled, sauntered off to the edge of the water, and made his first cast.
I was in absolute shock! This seemingly frail old man had cast whatever lure he was using a good 100 yards out with seemingly little effort, almost twice as far as I was casting my lures. His lure hit the water and within seconds there was a massive splash and he was hooked up. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. After 15 minutes or so he landed a 25 poundish Roosterfish. He quickly unhooked it, released it and made a second cast. BAM!!! Another one, bigger than the first one. I sat there watching this guy for 90 minutes or so. In that time he had made only 6 casts and landed 3 beautiful Roosterfish and a very large Jack Crevalle. After his fourth fish he was burnt out and packed it in.
I approached him as he came back towards me on his way to his car, introduced myself to him and asked him what the hell it was he was throwing out there. He told me his name was Bob Simon, he was from New Jersey, and that he was tossing a lure he had invented back in early ’70s that he called the “Robert’s Ranger.” Just like my own Klassic Poppers, these Ranger lures looked very rudimentary and simply made. Home-made really, which in fact they were.
I want to say that Bob worked for NASA back in the ’60s and ’70s, at least that’s what I seem to remember. I might have glamorized the story in my mind back then; maybe he worked for IBM or another early tech company. Anyway, Bob had been some kind of computer programmer back when computers were the size of buildings. He was also an avid surf/shore fisherman and fished his Jersey shores heavily for Striped Bass and Bluefish. At some point he took advantage of his computer skills and messed around programming numbers and data etc. in to the computer he had access to in order to find the perfect aerodynamic shape, size, and weight of the “perfect” casting fishing lure. And not only that, the exact materials to use to make these lures and their structural and chemical compounds. When all was said and done, he had created the Ranger, a topwater fishing lure, for the aforementioned Jersey fish!
He made the Ranger in four sizes … 13/4 ounces, 21/4 ounces, 3 ounces, and 4 ounces. I asked him why 13/4 ounce and 21/4 ounce sizes instead of 1 and 2 ounces. He told me that the aerodynamic shape of the Ranger, according to the computer numbers, could not be made in 1 or 2 ounce sizes, ONLY those four exact sizes. Even at those weights, the 13/4 and 4 ounce sizes are slightly different shapes than the 21/4 and 3 ounce versions, which have the same shape.
Whatever he did in his past life, when I met him on the beach in his late ’80s, he was then a bible salesman and a pilot of his own plane, which he flew to Cabo with his wife, where they had a huge house up on the hills just east of San Lucas. He apparently sold a shwack load of bibles.
I’ll get back to the story here in a second but jumping ahead a bit I want to mention that since making these lures famous world-wide I’ve seen at least two dozen wannabe lure makers, including several large lure manufacturers, knock off — or try to knock off — this lure and even though they may look the same, they are most definitely not the same! All these copycats do is make silicone molds of originals, run a wire through them, slipping on an egg sinker to give it weight, and then think they’ve duplicated it. What they don’t get is that every component of the lure from the exact body shape, type of wire, the custom molded lead insert (where that lead is placed within the lure) and the chemical recipe of the PVC plastic used, has been engineered to make it the perfect lure that Bob had designed. Subsequently not even one of these copies casts the same or rides the surface the same as an original. Okay, back to the story.
Bob also told me at our first meeting that only a few small tackle shops in the Northeast U.S. were selling his lures and he was wondering how to make them more widely used and known. I told him that I was getting ready to open a tackle shop there in Cabo, specializing in surf/shore fishing and that his lures would be a perfect fit. He invited me to his house to meet his wife and have dinner and thus our relationship began. I opened my shop a few months later, started my guided surf/shore fishing trips using our two lure creations and they took off! During season I was booked solid, with two 3 hour trips a day, seven days a week. At least 75% of the time we used the Ranger lure and our catch numbers for Roosterfish (the fish that couldn’t be caught from shore), Jack Crevalle, Sierra Macs, Yellowtail, and Pargo (Cubera Snapper) were staggering. Every 3 months or so Bob flew down to Cabo and would bring me 1000 Rangers for the shop. Everybody went nuts for them.
I started writing articles for fishing magazines and a lot of them traveled down as well to write about them on my surf/shore fishing trips, with the Ranger lure being highlighted. I was the guest on several fishing shows that came down; we’d slow troll live bait along the shorelines of Los Cabos, with someone at the bow casting Rangers right up on to the sand and cranking them in back towards the boat, usually netting us more fish than the live bait. On top of that, even though I lived in Cabo I still liked to travel the world fishing and ended up taking both of our lures to Costa Rica, Australia, New Zealand, Hawaii, Fiji and even Midway Atoll. Half the time I’d write fishing articles about the places, either for magazines or my website, and again, the Ranger was constantly mentioned in them. The word was out.
Somewhere in around ’95 or ’96 Bob, in his early nineties, had stopped flying to Cabo in his own plane and only came down sporadically; if I remember his wife had already passed away by then. He approached me to buy him out of his lure business, at a cost of $85,000. I told him that a) it was only worth (at best) a third of that given that it was just me and his few tackle shops selling his lures and b) even if it was worth that I couldn’t afford to buy him out at that time anyway. I never heard from Bob again.
A few months later I found out that the other tackle shop in Cabo was carrying Rangers, as well a shop in Puerto Vallarta, Mazatlan, and even an East Cape lodge buying direct. I no longer had exclusivity. There were also online shops and several tackle shops in Southern California selling them. I was wondering how this was all suddenly happening when I get a call from a man named Peter Johnson from New Hampshire/Martha’s Vineyard, saying that he was the new owner of “Robert’s Lures.” He was touching base with me to see if I would continue selling the Ranger, which of course I did, as it was my bread and butter product. Shortly after that call I was up in Long Beach, California with a booth at a large fishing trade show. Peter knew I was attending and asked if he could come share the booth, promoting the Ranger. I expressed to him that I wasn’t happy that everyone and their dog in Mexico and California was selling these lures that I had made famous, without being made some kind of distributor or at least getting some kind of percentage from sales in Mexico. He said that he would be happy to make me the distributor for Mexico and that we’d talk about it at the show.
So he came and we shared the booth and developed what I thought to be a friendship and potential business partnership as well. Over the five day event we talked about everything related to Robert’s Lures and he shared with me that he had purchased the company from Bob Simon for $30,000. I was livid! Had I been offered the business for that I would have bought it when it was offered. My guess is that Bob realized that I was right, the business wasn’t worth anywhere near $85,000, finally came to his senses, but was too embarrassed to come back to me and sold it to Peter. On top of that, Peter had reached out to all the other shops in Mexico and California tackle shops that catered to Mexican bound fishermen who had contacted Bob originally to sell the Ranger, which of course Bob didn’t allow. I was selling everything he could make. When Peter obtained the company, he saw all these enquiries, didn’t know me from a hole in the ground, and offered the Ranger up to anyone. It was a sad ending to a great story.
Cabo grew too big for me, I left in late 1998 for Washington state to develop a fishing tackle website and to host my fishing show on Fox Sports and OLN called Surf & Shore Fishing The World. I sold my tackle shop inventory and lease at the entrance to the Mar de Cortez Hotel to a guy from California, who made one small payment to me, before liquidating the assets and ripping me off completely. I was too busy with the show to be bothered tracking the guy down and trying to sue him in Mexico. Sigh. The shop was re-opened then by Stephan Jantzen from Holland, who was originally a surf/shore fishing client then a friend of mine, in the early ‘90s. Stephan continued with the guided surf/shore fishing trips, invested a lot in to the business and made it in to an awesome tackle shop, loading it up with custom rods and lures. As far as I know he’s still there with the shop, albeit no longer at the Hotel Mar de Cortez. Stefan gave me some of the photos in this book, for which I thank him.
I diverted again, sorry. Don’t worry, this story is coming to an end.
Well, I was never given representation or distribution rights to the Ranger by Peter Johnson, but was always promised by him that one day he would retire and the business would be mine, insinuating that he would just give it to me, since I was really it’s modern developer/promoter. I had multiple ideas to expand the Ranger and market it around the world and was waiting for my opportunity. I waited for my time, continuing to sell the lure on-line in much smaller quantities, since you could get them anywhere. A few years ago Peter called me and said that he was having health issues and wanted me to buy him out and I asked the all-important question: “how much?” Like deja vu he threw out a huge number that didn’t make any sense. $100,000, plus he wanted ten years of salary and some kind of other payment to his wife. All this while he was grossing $35,000 a year, netting probably half that. I told him he was out of his mind and just like Bob … I never heard from him again. I stopped selling on line altogether just after that, concentrating on writing.
A year or so passed, I’d visited several of the tackle shops in Mexico that had been selling the Ranger and they were either discontinued with only a handful for sale, or out altogether. I asked them what happened and they all said that the company had closed. I Googled Peter and found out that he had passed away some six months earlier. I found out his wife’s contact information and left a voicemail, hoping to see if there was a way for me to buy what was left of Robert’s Lures. I knew from Peter that he was estranged from his kids and figured that his wife may have been the new owner and probably didn’t want it. She never called back. I sadly thought that it was the end of the Ranger life. And then …
Out of the blue I get a call from someone named Scott Johnson, the estranged son of Peter, telling me that he’d inherited Robert’s Lures from his Dad and saw my name all over everything to do with the Ranger, old orders, publicity stuff, photos of me etc. and wondered who the heck I was. I gave him this story I just told you here and he informed me that he’s firing up the Ranger again. We’re currently discussing ways how we can possibly join efforts and make it the lure it once was. It really was/is a special lure, I hope to see it out again soon. If so, I’ll make it available at my website www.reel1in.com.