WATER FUN | Water Fun + Fishing
Hooked on
Antique Fishing Lures A by Mike Petrucelli photos courtesy of indianafishinglures.com
Some 25,000 years ago, a prehistoric artist carved a relief of a salmon into the wall of the Abri du Poisson (Fish Rock Shelter) Cave in France. Millennia later, a lot of ink is spilled and a lot of pixels are posted about fish and fishing. And, why not? Fishing is a means of survival, a job, and a pastime. Why shouldn’t it also manifest as art?
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LAKElife Magazine June 2021
rt is where you find it. In the case of fishing, you can see that kind of expression in antique fishing lures that date back to the early 1900s.
“A lot more detail went into them, a lot more thought went into them,” said Travis Dunn, who collects antique fishing lures made in Indiana and displays them on his website and blog, indianafishinglures.com. “They were different than the ones now that you use only a few times.”
Dunn has collected antique Indiana lures for about 15-20 years now, when an eBay search for a Rapala bass lure he was looking for turned up some vintage baits that were selling for $50, and even as much as $100. He got interested in the history of some of these unusual-looking lures and he was, well, hooked. “It was kind of like treasure hunting. I just started collecting old lures,” he said.
