Idling into the Lower Laguna, the eastern shore is barely visible through the haze of Saharan dust sweeping across South Texas. “Prepare to get sandblasted,” says Mark, before hammering the throttle on his Maverick skiff. The hole-shot floats our breakfast bag up into the air, pinning it against the rear jack plate. Oblivious to the rescue at hand, he’s deep in thought, anticipating where yesterday’s redfish might turn up this morning, while I belly-crawl to retrieve our lunch from the roaring outboard. Eventually, unbeknownst to Mark, our burritos are safely in hand, and a short while later we reach our destination just as the sun is beginning to rise.
Backdropped by the unique southwestern flora of the Laguna Atascosa National Wildlife Refuge, we drift momentarily over a shallow bar blanketed in shoal grass, with mullet dimpling at the surface. Savoring his last sip of coffee, he reaches for one of the many plastic lures scattered around our feet. “Texas croaker,” he grins, examining his newest creation as a lapidary would a diamond. He motions for me to stand on the bow, then corrects the boat’s direction with the push-pole, pointing us toward a patchwork of sandy potholes in search of tails, backs or anything else that looks fishy.
“Eleven o’clock – redfish,” he says, and I quickly cast toward a single tail flagging against the shoreline. “Way left,” he sighs, as I frantically retrieve the plastic jig across the surface. “Try again, nine o’clock – ‘bout ten yards.” This time I drop a short cast just in front of the cruising fish, and it charges the offering. “Groovy!” Mark laughs, as my rod bends to the whine of the reel’s drag. Seconds later he’s also hooked up with a stocky seatrout, and after a brief tug-of-war we both hop down from our posts to land and release our fish.
It’s as good as it gets.
A Lagoon Lost
After seeing, casting to and catching another half-dozen or so redfish, we drift over a large area of prop-scarred seagrass crisscrossing in all directions. A half-mile ahead, a shower of mud and water sprays from under a tunnel hull stuck on a bar. “They don’t know what they’ve got, do they?” I ask, as Mark squints to see what the commotion is all about. “No, I don’t think so.”
The reminder is painful. Juxtaposed against this pristine fishery is a lifetime of memories harking back to the heyday of his home water – Florida’s world-famous Indian River Lagoon. Home to the world-record seatrout, the Mosquito Lagoon and its giant bull redfish, and near its southern end, a tidal utopia where forty-inch snook stacked like cordwood in Bahamian-blue water. Gone. Reduced to a barren wasteland devoid of grass, fish and anything higher on the food chain than a horseshoe crab.
The result of a few weekend Joes stuck on a sandbar? No, a much larger problem – one that involved polluted discharges, politics and governmental mismanagement, which pushed the estuary past its ecological tipping point and ended with the decimation of what may have been the greatest inshore destination in the country.
A Texan Comes Home
But more than a thousand miles away, Mark seems right at home here on the Laguna. Truth is, he’s actually a Texan. Born Mark Steven Nichols to a Galveston shrimp boat captain, he grew up working on his father’s boat before graduating high school and heading up to Durango, Colorado, to pursue adventure – in the form of fishing.
A free-spirited product of the ’60s, he once partied with Jerry Jeff Walker and Willie Nelson at a roadside swimming hole, in the ’70s hiked the Mexican Baja for months living communally with strangers, and one blood-red sunset watched in solitude as Pacific whales eclipsed the sun. He was datsuzoku long before backpacking hipsters discovered the word. But it was his love of fishing, and possibly a woman, that led him east to Stuart, Florida – at the time an inshore fishing mecca – where since the late 1980s he’s been creating soft plastic lures for anglers all over the world.
Deadly On Anything
As earthy and approachable as he is, Nichols’s place among tackle-industry giants can’t be overstated. From Fred Arbogast and Lauri Rapala to contemporaries like Patrick Sebile and Gary Yamamoto, they all share the same intangible: creating lures that catch fish. In Mark’s case, that happened one afternoon in 1988, when at his kitchen table he carved out what would become the first – and best-selling – artificial shrimp lure.
As demand for his creation grew, he christened his company with three red Helvetica letters – D.O.A. (Deadly On Anything). For three decades, this made-in-the-USA plastic crustacean has weathered thousands of imitations, whether mass-produced by corporate-backed competitors or blatant Chinese knockoffs sold for half the price. And he’s still here, proudly crafting lures in a small shop back in Stuart, “‘bout a mile down the road” from his house, as he puts it, and testing them on the water one trip at a time.
At the time of this 2018 trip, the day-to-day task of running the business was left to a team of competent employees, most of whom had been with the company for decades, while Mark groomed the next face of his brand through media events, shows and photo shoots. “Ed’s a great ambassador for DOA and will do a fine job taking this thing to the next level,” he says of his protégé, Captain Ed Zyak, a former FLW tournament pro and then DOA’s marketing director.
“It’s in good hands,” he smiles, while rigging another lure to cast before lunch. After catching one last redfish, he pulls down his buff and opens the bag of wrapped burritos. “Stripes,” he says, biting into a chorizo and potato tortilla. “I could get used to this.”
To see the full lineup, visit DOA Lures.
