Ok, history lesson time. One, blue Mackerel has been a pattern in the Gibbs line for over forty years plus. Stan started shipping to California when shops out there started requesting his plugs. When he started to fill orders for Mackerel of course he shipped them green mackerel, which of course Atlantic Mackerel are when alive and healthy ( anyone who knows anything about fishing live mackerel knows the atlantics turn blue when stressed out and are about to die, whereupon they stay blue). Anyway the Clifornis guys quickly informed Stan that Pcific Macks are blue all the time healthy or dead so he started painting blue mackerel pattern for the west coast and thats how that started. ( if you take a Gibbs blue mack plug and hang it in a southwestern facing window, mack side out, over the winter, the blue fades and the plug produces even better) Now the pink mack design was a gibbs first as well in the early seventies and was initially painted on darters. When word got out that Pink Mackerel was hot, #^&#^&#^&#^& Pleska, a wholesale tackle dealer out of Worcester, who I onced worked for as a side job, had Plastics Research and Developement, now known as Pradco, paint up a bunch of pink mack 6 inch and seven inch super windcheater rebels in the winter of 76'. Old man Mac Reed of Orleans was the first to by some when #^&#^&#^&#^& showed him and they caught fish immmediatly, the rest is history. #^&#^&#^&#^& was also responsible for the developement of the bone rebel which has been re-discovered by Bomber. Thisd was after I started dipping whole rebels in flat white ceiling paint, hooks and all in 77' and started to take fish on Monomoy when no one else could by a fish in August of that year. Then I noticed if that you sanded down a beat up rebeol or redfin that the bone colored plastic underneath was interesting and after rigging up a couple Re-fins one night and demonstrating to #^&#^&#^&#^& how well they worked he called Pradco and two weeks later we had brand new bone windcheaters with us on the beach and once again old man Mac Reed was the first to stock them in his store in Orleans. History lesson over, there will be a test tomorrow.
