KAILUA-KONA, HAWAII — ACTIVE YEARS c. 1954 – LATE 1990s

George Parker is, alongside Henry Chee, a father of the Hawaiian trolling lure. One of Kona's pioneering charter captains and an IGFA Hall of Famer, he started fishing in the 1940s — running his boat, the Mona H — and helped build the island's charter scene partly through pure showmanship: he and a few other skippers would hoist fresh marlin on a block and tackle slung from a palm tree in front of the Kona Inn bar, drawing tourists and booking charters on the spot.

The lure that started everything came from a trash pile. Around 1945, Parker spotted discarded chrome towel-bar tubing at a Kona Inn renovation and took it home to experiment. He cut the tubing into heads, force-fit a wooden dowel inside, drilled a center hole for the leader, cut the face on a shallow bevel, added lead for stability, and skirted it with vinyl and inner-tube rubber. His contemporaries laughed — until he came back from his first test run towing a roughly 500-pound marlin. It's widely regarded as the first Hawaiian-style trolling lure ever made.

His place in history was sealed in November 1954. Running solo to dry-dock the Mona H in Honolulu, Parker hooked and fought a 1,002-pound Pacific blue by himself in the rough Kaʻiwi Channel — the first documented grander landed in U.S. waters, smashing the All-Tackle world record. Photos of the fish at the Honolulu scales ran on mainland magazine covers and introduced Hawaiian lure fishing to the world. His son, born shortly after, was named Marlin in honor of the fish — and would later found Marlin Magic.

Parker traded lure ideas with Henry Chee in those early days, and the two effectively launched a craft that now spans the globe. He kept fishing into his 80s — landing an 836-pound blue at age 86 — and passed away in 2008 at 96. Nearly every maker in this archive traces back, in one way or another, to what he built out of a piece of bathroom hardware.

As a museum and archive, we're honored to document and help preserve the legacy of George Parker for the anglers, collectors, and historians who carry on Hawaii's lure-making tradition.

Notable shapes: Chrome "towel-bar" bevel/slant tube (center-pull straight runner)

Identification tips:

• Genuine Parker lures are exceptionally rare — historical/collector pieces, not everyday circulation
• Construction is the tell: chrome tube over a wooden dowel core, center-pull leader hole, shallow hand-cut bevel face, ~1¼–1½" diameter
• Period skirting — vinyl and red inner-tube rubber strips
• Authenticate through provenance and known collectors

Below, you’ll find our ever-growing digital archive showcasing every lure that has come through our shop. This collection is constantly evolving as new lures arrive, making it a living record of rare, limited-production lures. We will continue updating this database regularly, building what we aim to be the largest digital archive of offshore trolling lures in the world.

If you have any further information or any lures you believe deserve to be showcased, please reach out to us at ren@luremonger.com