AUGUSTA --Make a better mousetrap -- or in the case of Jim Gagne and Lance Scarborough, a better fishing lure -- and the world will beat a path to your doorway. That's what happened with Mac Lavigne of Mount Vernon and his nephew Neil after the younger Lavigne sampled his first catch with one of Gagne and Scarborough's lures last weekend. "I tried one out a couple of years ago and they worked real well with different kinds of fish," Mac Lavigne said. "I told my nephew about it; we were out last weekend and on his third cast, boom." The lure's aren't available everywhere, so when Neil Lavigne found Gagne and Scarborough's Kennebec Lure Co. booth at the 2006 State of Maine Sportsman's Show at the Augusta Civic Center on Saturday, he jumped at the chance to add several Kennebec Lures to his own tackle-box collection. Gagne and Scarborough's little firm is still a sideline for the pair of fishing entrepreneurs. Scarborough works for a national package delivery company and Gagne, a resident of Hollis Center, where their business is headquartered, owns a sandwich shop in Old Orchard Beach. But with word of mouth like Lavigne's not uncommon in the state's fishing camps and among tackle dealers, Gagne said, they've seen a doubling of sales in each of their first two years in business, hoping for more of the same as they start their third fishing season on the market. "We were fishing a lot and you'd go in a buy lures and spend a lot of money. So we started making our own lures" at least six years ago, Gagne said. "We gave some to people and they started talking about them and other people wanted them. It didn't start out to be a business. It was more like a hobby." But as word of the two men's lures, spinners, trolling spoons and jigs spread, they started to wonder if they could make money from the phenomenon.

                             Making their own lures wasn't only driven by the cost of commercial products, Gagne said, but also because they couldn't find lures made as well as those they remembered from their own childhoods. So Kennebec Lures are stamped to their specifications by a manufacturer from solid brass with scaling and bright "prizm" tape that makes each one glitter, all assembled by them and a couple of friends. Scarborough said they are very particular to use only American-made products in their lures, although that is becoming harder since only one fishhook manufacturer remains in the U.S. "It takes three things" to make a lure successful, Scarborough explains. "It's the movement (through the water), it's the color and it's the sparkle. All our lures are made for their flash." "We try to run them a year at least before we put them out," he said. Both connected with the Old Orchard Beach area, Gagne said the name of their company comes from the men's love of fishing on the Kennebec River over the past two decades. "We tried a couple of other names, but that one just seemed to flow," Scarborough said. Aiming mostly at wholesale business, Scarborough and Gagne have 20-25 shops carrying their lures. They sell directly to retail customers only at sportsmen's shows and online. Gagne said he recently met one of his lure customers for the first time at a show in Worcester, Mass. The man told him the local tackle dealer near his Rangeley, Maine, camp had run out of Kennebec Lures so he drove 40 miles to a New Hampshire shop to get just what he wanted to fish in Maine. One commercial fishing-camp owner on Long Pond in Belgrade told the pair his customers had caught 50 salmon in one day on the company's spinners. You can't buy that kind of advertising among fishermen, Gagne said. "If you go into a camp and the guy says they've been catching 50 salmon in one day, they're going to buy them in handfuls," he said. "We're starting to get that. I think certainly the made-in-Maine end of it sells good. And I think quality sells. Not everybody is out to purchase a cheap item." Kennebec Lure prices cost between $2.50 and $4.50 each. Gagne and Scarborough aren't ready to quit their day jobs any time soon. But they can dream. "It's more like a retirement thing, that sort of thing," says Gagne smiling.