Friends beat the heat and build a better fishing light

ROCKPORT — With a full moon gliding across twinkling stars, the boat bobbed beside a dock piling while emitting an eerie green glow that pierced the water in every direction.

“All we need now are UFOs to swoop in — we look like the mother ship,” Andy MacAllister said.

He was, after all, trying to attract aliens from another world — creatures of the deep, specifically speckled trout and red drum.

They came, and so did others including an unearthly looking dogfish, a stingray, mangrove snappers, sand trout, ladyfish and, of course, the ubiquitous hardheads.

Reeling in another speck, MacAllister grinned while enjoying two passions — fishing at night and using the fishing lights he and three friends design and build themselves.

About 13 years ago, MacAllister, John Ross and Mike Scarella were night fishing with a store-bought submersible light.

“We looked at it and said, ‘We can make a better one than this,’” Ross recalled.

So they founded The Fishinglights Co., based in Houston.

Of course, it helps that MacAllister is a former NASA engineer who also worked for an oilfield wire-line company, Ross and Scarella are electronics technicians and Stuart Ross, John’s brother, is a NASA engineer working on payload safety for the space shuttle.

But it wasn’t easy to come up with a light that met their expectations for durability, long life, the ability to attract fish and the engineering, design and components they say leave the competition in its wake.

After about a dozen prototypes, they began marketing a green fluorescent fishing light in a clear PVC tube.

New this year is an LED Tube model that uses wide-angle lights, pierces the water better and is fairly indestructible compared to a fluorescent light.

“Sales of the fluorescents have gone down, and the LEDs are really going strong,” Ross said.

Anglers long have known that fishing at night under lights at piers and docks can be productive. The light fires up the food chain by attracting phytoplankton, bait fish and predators.

The portable Fishinglights, which run off 12-volt gel cells or deep-cycle marine batteries, can go just about anywhere, even on kayaks. Green lights are used because fish’s eyes are attuned to green.

Then there are the human benefits of fishing at night.

“You don’t need moon screen,” said Capt. Doug Stanford of Pirates of the Bay Charters. “In the heat of the summer, it’s the best time to go. Fish are nocturnal. You’re more likely to catch limits at night, and you catch a wider species — all kinds of weird things that hide in the day.

“Besides that, you don’t have to mess with crowds at the boat ramp or at your favorite fishing spot or worry about morons on the bay. They’re at the bar drinking — let them.”

Stanford prefers to guide at night and does so as often as clients ask, which usually is once a week. He runs from light to light to find fish, but also uses portable T8 LED Tube lights.

“I love the Fishinglights guys’ lights,” he said. “They work very well.”

While that is their intention, none of them plan to quit their day jobs, even though major retailers have approached them. Instead, they assemble the lights in the evenings or weekends to avoid the quality-control issues of mass production.

“We’re not interested in getting huge,” MacAllister said. “This is more of a passion than a job.”